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RECOLLECTIONS 



OF 



A PRIVATE SOLDIER 



IN THE 



ARMY OF THE POTOMAC 



FRANK WILI^SO 



^WNGTON. Oil' 



NEW YORK & LONDON 

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 

SC^c ^ttickfrbocktr ^rtss 
1887 




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COPYRIGHT BY 

FRANK WILKESON 
1886 



Press of 

G. P. Putnam's Sons 

New York 



CONTENTS. 



•"^ROM Barracks to Front i 

n^Q^Jsjl' AT Brandy Station 21 




4«:CHING TO THE BATTLE OF THE WILDERNESS . . 42 

iTiiE Battle of the Wilderness . . . .55 

Fighting around Spottsylvania .... 81 
The Flank Movement from Spottsylvania to the 

North Anna River o^ 

Studying Confederate Earthworks at North 

Anna „o 

The Battle of Cold Harbor 124 

Fighting around Petersburg 153 

Condition of the Army of the Potomac after 

Petersburg ^^ 

How Men Die in Battle lo- 

Early in Front of Washington .... 208 
The Military Prison at Elmira . . . .220 

In the Southwest 231 

iii 



PREFACE. 

THE history of the fighting to suppress the 
slave-holders' rebellion, thus far written, 
has been the work of commanding generals. The 
private soldiers who won the battles, when they 
were given a chance to win them, and lost them 
through the ignorance and incapacity of com- 
manders, have scarcely begun to write the history 
from their point of view. The two will be found 
to differ materially. The epauletted history has 
been largely inspired by vanity or jealousy, sav- 
ing and excepting forever the immortal record, 
Grant's dying gift to his countrymen, which is as 
modest as it is truthful, and as just as it is modest. 
Most of this war history has been written to 
repair damaged or wholly ruined military repu- 
tations. It has been made additionally un- 
trustworthy by the jealousy which seeks to 
belittle the work of others, or to falsify or ob- 
scure it, in order to render more conspicu- 
ous the achievements of the historians. The 
men who carried the muskets, served the guns, 



VI RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE. 

and rode in the saddle had no military reputa- 
tions to defend or create, and they brought not 
out of the war professional jealousy of their 
comrades. They and they alone can supple- 
ment the wonderful contribution made by Grant 
to the history of the struggle to suppress the 
rebellion. Who beside the enlisted men can tell 
how the fierce Confederates looked and fought 
behind their earthworks and in the open ; how 
the heroic soldiers of the impoverished South 
were clothed, armed, and fed ? Who beside our 
enlisted men can or will tell their countrymen 
how the volunteers who saved the republic 
lived in camp ; lived in the field ; on the 
march ; what they talked about ; how they 
criticised the campaigns, and criticised their 
officers and commanders ; how oft they hun- 
gered and thirsted ; how, through parts of cam- 
paigns, and through entire campaigns, they 
slept unsheltered on the ground, and too often 
in snow or mud ; how they fought (honor and 
glory for ever and ever to these matchless war- 
riors ! ) and how they died ? 

I was one of these private soldiers. As one 
of them, I make this my contribution to the 
true history of the war. And I call on those 
of my comrades in the ranks who yet survive, 



PREFACE. VU 



in whatever part of the country they served, to 
make haste to leave behind them as their con- 
tributions, what they actually saw and did, and 
what their commanders refused, or neglected or 
failed to do. Very many of you were the equals, 
and not a few of you were the superiors, of your 
officers in intelligence, courage, and military 
ability. Your judgment about the conduct of 
the war, by reason of the vastness of your num- 
ber, will have the force of public opinion. That 
is almost invariably right. The opinion of the 
rank and file of an army of Americans will be 
equally right. The grumbling of a single soldier 
at a camp fire may be unreasonable and his 
criticism abusive. The criticism of 100,000 
American soldiers will be absolute truth. 

I am conscious of imperfect performance of 
the task I set to myself in the writing of this 
book. In a later edition I hope to have the 
opportunity to correct my short-coming. Mod- 
eration and forbearance of statement and 
opinion have been my error. Occasionally I 
ceased to write as a soldier in the ranks. Too 
frequently I wrote as a generous narrator a 
quarter of a century after the events. I ought 
to have written from title-page to cover as if I 
were still in the ranks. And the limited com- 



Vlll RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE, 

pass of the book forbade the consideration of 
two subjects about which I feel deeply, and 
which I propose hereafter to treat with what 
strength I possess. For much thinking ovei 
my experience as a private in the Army of the 
Potomac has confirmed me in the belief I then 
entertained, that the two capital errors in the 
conduct of the war on the Union side were ; 

First. The calling for volunteers to suppress 
the rebellion, instead of at the outset creating 
armies by drawing soldiers ratably and by lot 
from the able-bodied population, between the 
ages of twenty and forty, of all the free States 
and territories. 

Second. The officering of the commands in 
the various armies with West Point graduates 
by preference, on the assumption that they 
knew the art of war and were soldiers, and 
were therefore the fittest to command soldiers. 

It is my purpose in the future edition of this 
book to show how the resort to volunteeringj 
the unprincipled dodge of cowardly politicians, 
ground up the choicest seed-corn of the nation ; 
how it consumed the young, the patriotic, the 
intelligent, the generous, the brave ; how it 
wasted the best moral, social, and political ele- 
ments of the republic, leaving the cowards. 



PREFA CE. IX 

shirks, egotists, and money-makers to stay at 
home and procreate their kind ; how the Lex- 
ingtons being away in the war, the production 
of Lexington colts ceased. 

Again, I carried out with me from the ranks, 
not only the feeling, but the knowledge derived 
from my own experience and from the current 
history of the war, that the military salvation 
of this country requires that the West Point 
Academy be destroyed. Successful command- 
ers of armies are not made. Like great poets 
they are born. Men like Caesar, Marlborough, 
Napoleon, and Grant are not the products of 
schools. They occur sparingly in the course 
of nature. West Point turns out shoulder- 
strapped office-holders. It cannot produce 
soldiers ; for these are, as I claim, born, and not 
made. And it is susceptible of demonstration 
that the almost ruinous delay in suppressing 
the rebellion and restoring the Union ; the 
deadly failure of campaigns year after year ; 
the awful waste of the best soldiers the world 
has seen ; and the piling up of the public debt 
into the billions, was wholly due to West Point 
influence and West Point commanders. They 
were commanders, but they were not soldiers. 

Frank Wilkeson. 



RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE. 



I. 

FROM BARRACKS TO FRONT. 

I WAS a private soldier in the war to sup- 
press the rebellion. I write of the life of 
a private soldier. I gloss over nothing. The 
enlisted men, of whom I was one, composed 
the army. We won or lost the battles. I tell 
how we lived, how we fought, wli^t we talked 
of o' nights, of our aspirations and fears. I do 
not claim to have seen all of Grant's last cam- 
paign ; but what I saw I faithfully record. 

The war fever seized me in 1863. All the 
summer and fall I had fretted and burned to 
be off. That winter, and before I was sixteen 
years old, I ran away from my father's high- 
lying Hudson River valley farm. I went to 
Albany and enlisted in the Eleventh New York 
Battery, then at the front in Virginia, and was 

X 



2 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVA TE. 

promptly sent out to the penitentiary building. 
There, to my utter astonishment, I found eight 
hundred or one thousand ruffians, closely 
guarded by heavy lines of sentinels, who 
paced to and fro, day and night, rifle in hand, 
to keep them from running away. When I 
entered the barracks these recruits gathered 
around me and asked, " How much bounty 
did you get ? " " How many times have you 
jumped the bounty?" I answered that I had 
not bargained for any bounty, that I had never 
jumped a bounty, and that I had enlisted to go 
to the front and fight. I was instantly assailed 
with abuse. Irreclaimable blackguards, thieves, 
and ruffians gathered in a boisterous circle 
around me and called me foul names. I was 
robbed while in these barracks of all I pos- 
sessed — a pipe, a piece of tobacco and a knife. 
I remained in this nasty prison for a month. I 
became thoroughly acquainted with my com- 
rades. A recruit's social standing in the bar- 
racks was determined by the acts of villany he 
had performed, supplemented by the number 
of times he had jumped the bounty. The so- 
cial standing of a hard-faced, crafty pickpocket, 
who had jumped the bounty in say half a dozen 
cities, was assured. He shamelessly boasted of 



FROM BARRACKS TO FRONT. 3 

his rascally agility. Less active bounty-jump- 
ers looked up to him as to a leader. He com- 
manded their profound respect. When he 
talked, men gathered around him in crowds 
and listened attentively to words of wisdom 
concerning bounty-jumping that dropped from 
his tobacco-stained lips. His right to occupy 
the most desirable bunk, or to stand at the head 
of the column when we prepared to march to 
the kitchen for our rations, was undisputed. If 
there was a man in all that shameless crew who 
had enlisted from patriotic motives, I did not 
see him. There was not a man of them who 
was not eager to run away. Not a man who 
did not quake when he thought of the front. 
Almost to a man they were bullies and cow- 
ards, and almost to a man they belonged to 
the criminal classes. 

I had been in this den of murderers and 
thieves for a week, when my uncle William 
Wilkeson of Buffalo found me. My absence 
from the farm had caused a search of the New 
York barracks to be made for me. My uncle, 
finding that I was resolute in my intention to 
go to the front, and that I would not accept a 
discharge, boy as I was, did the best thing he 
could for me, and that was to vouch for me to 



4 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE. 

the major, named Van Rensselaer, I think, who 
.was in charge of the barracks. He knew my 
family, and when he heard that I had run away 
from home to enlist, and that I would not 
accept a discharge, he gave me the freedom of 
the city. I had a pass which I left in charge of 
the officer of the guard when not using it, be- 
cause I was afraid I would be robbed of it if I 
took it into the barracks. The fact of my 
having a pass became known to the bounty- 
jumpers, and I was repeatedly offered large 
sums of money for it. In the room in which I 
slept, a gang of roughs made up a pot of $1,700, 
counting out the money before me, and offered 
it to me if I would go out and at night put my 
pass in a crack between two designated boards 
that formed a portion of a high fence that sur- 
rounded the penitentiary grounds. I refused 
to enter into the scheme, and they attacked 
me savagely, and would have beaten me, per- 
haps to dea- n, if the guards, hearing the noise, 
had not rushed in. Of course they swore that 
I had madly assaulted them with a heavy bed 
slat, and, of course, I was punished, and, equally 
of cours/b, I kept my mouth shut as to the real 
cause of the row, for fear that I would be mur- 
dered as I slept if I exposed them. In front of 



FROM BARRACKS TO FRONT. 5 

the barracks stood a high wooden horse, made 
by sticking four long poles into large holes 
bored into a smooth log, and then standing it 
upright. Two ladders, one at each end, led up 
to the round body of the wooden steed. A 
placard, on which was printed in letters four 
inches long the word " Fighting," was fastened 
on my back. Then I was led to the rear ladder 
and told to mount the horse and to shin along 
to the other end, and to sit there until I was 
released. The sentinel tapped his rifle signifi- 
cantly, and said, earnestly : '' It is loaded. If 
you dismount before you are ordered to, I shall 
kill you." I believed he meant what he said, 
and I did not get off till ordered to dismount. 
For the first hour I rather enjoyed the ride ; 
then my legs grew heavy, my knees pained 
dreadfully, and I grew feverish and was very 
thirsty. Other men came out of the barracks 
and climbed aloft to join in the pleasure of 
wooden horseback riding. They \ ughed at 
first, but soon began to swear in low tones, and 
to curse the days on which they were born. In 
the course of three hours the log filled up, and 
I dismounted to make room for a fresh offender. 
The placard was taken from my back, and I 
was gruffly ordered to '' get out of this." I 



6 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVA TE, 

staggered back a few yards, stooped to rub my 
lame knees, and looked at the gang who were 
sadly riding the wooden horse. Various words 
were printed on the cards that were fastened to 
their backs, but more than half of them an- 
nounced that the bearers were thieves. 

On my urgent solicitation Major Van Rens- 
selaer promised to ship me with the first de- 
tachment of recruits going to the front. One 
cold afternoon, directly after the ice had gone 
out of the Hudson River, we were ordered out 
of the barracks. We were formed into ranks, 
and stood in a long, curved line i,ooo rascals 
strong. We were counted, as was the daily 
custom, to see if any of the patriots had 
escaped. Then, after telling us to step four 
paces to the front as our names were called, 
the names of the men who were to form the 
detachment were shouted by a sergeant, and 
we stepped to the front, one after another, un- 
til 600 of us stood in ranks. We were marched 
to the barracks, and told to pack our knapsacks 
as we were to march at once. The 400 recruits 
who had not been selected were carefully 
guarded on the ground, so as to prevent their 
mingling with us. If that had happened, some 
of the recruits who had been chosen would 



FROM BARRACKS TO FRONT. y 

have failed to appear at the proper time. The 
idea was that if we were kept separate, all the 
men in the barracks, all outside of the men 
grouped under guard, would have to go. Be- 
fore I left the barracks I saw the guards roughly 
haul straw-littered, dust-coated men out of mat- 
resses, which they had cut open and crawled 
into to hide. Other men were jerked out of 
the water-closets. Still others were drawn by 
the feet from beneath bunks. One man, who 
had burrowed into the contents of a water-tight 
swill-box, which stood in the hall and into 
which we threw our waste food and cofTee slops, 
was fished out, covered with coffee grounds and 
bits of bread and shreds of meat, and kicked 
down stairs and out of the building. Ever after 
I thought of that soldier as the hero of the 
swill-tub. Cuffed, prodded with bayonets, and 
heartily cursed, we fell into line in front of the 
barracks. An officer stepped in front of us and 
said in a loud voice that any man who at- 
tempted to escape would be shot. A double 
line of guards quickly took their proper posi- 
tions around us. We were faced to the right 
and marched through a room, where the men 
were paid their bounties. Some men received 
$500, others less ; but I heard of no man who 



8 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE. 

received less than $400. I got nothing. As 
the men passed through the room they were 
formed into column by fours. When all the 
recruits had been paid, and the column formed, 
we started to march into Albany, guarded by a 
double line of sentinels. Long before we ar- 
rived at State Street three recruits attempted 
to escape. They dropped their knapsacks and 
fled wildly. Crack ! crack ! crack ! a dozen 
rifles rang out, and what had been three men 
swiftly running were three bloody corpses. The 
dead patriots lay by the roadside as we marched 
by. We marched down State Street, turned to 
the right at Broadway, and marched down that 
street to the steamboat landing. Previous to 
my enlistment I had imagined that the popu- 
lation of Albany would line the sidewalks to 
see the defenders of the nation march proudly 
by, bound for the front, and that we would be 
cheered, and would unbend sufficiently to ac- 
cept floral offerings from beautiful maidens. 
How was it ? No exultant cheers arose from 
the column. The people who saw us did not 
cheer. The faces of the recruits plainly ex- 
pressed the profound disgust they felt at the 
disastrous outcome of what had promised to be 
a remunerative financial enterprise. Small boys 



FROM BARRACKS TO FRONT. 9 

derided us. Mud balls were thrown at us. 
One small lad, who was greatly excited by the 
unwonted spectacle, rushed to a street corner, 
and after placing his hands to his mouth, yelled 
to a distant and loved comrade: '' Hi, Johnnie, 
come see de bounty-jumpers!" He was 
promptly joined by an exasperating, red-headed, 
sharp-tongued little wretch, whom I desired to 
destroy long before we arrived at the steam- 
boat landing. Men and women openly laughed 
at us. Fingers, indicative of derision, were 
pointed at us. Yes, a large portion of the 
populace of Albany gathered together to see 
us; but they were mostly young males, called 
guttersnipes. They jeered us, and were ex- 
ceedingly loth to leave us. It was as though 
the congress of American wonders were parad- 
ing in the streets preparatory to aerial flights 
under tented canvas. 

Once on the steamboat, we were herded on 
the lower deck, where freight is usually carried, 
like cattle. No one dared to take ofT his knap- 
sack for fear it would be stolen. Armed sen- 
tinels stood at the openings in the vessel's sides 
out of which gangplanks were thrust. Others 
were stationed in the bows ; others in the dark 
narrow passage-ways where the shaft turns ; 



lO RECOLLECTIOXS OF A PRIVATE, 

still others were on the decks. We were hemmed 
in by a wall of glistening steel. '' Stand back, 
stand back, damn you! " was the only remark 
the alert-eyed, stern-faced sentinels uttered, and 
the necessity of obeying that command was 
impressed on us by menacing bayonets. 
Whiskey, guard-eluding whiskey, got in. Bot- 
tles, flasks, canteens, full of whiskey, circulated 
freely among us, and many men got drunk. 
There was an orgie on the North River steamer 
that night, but comparatively a decent one. In 
spite of the almost certain death sure to ensue 
if a man attempted to escape, two men jumped 
overboard. I saw one of these take off his 
knapsack, loosen his overcoat and then sit down 
on his knapsack. He drew a whiskey flask from 
an inner pocket and repeatedly stimulated his 
courage. He watched the guards who stood by 
the opening in the vessel's side intently. At 
last they turned their heads for an instant. The 
man sprang to his feet, dropped his overcoat 
and ran to the opening and jumped far out into 
the cold waters of the river. Instantly the 
guards began to fire. Above us, in front of us, 
at our sides, behind us, wherever guards were 
stationed, there rifles cracked. But it was ex- 
ceeding dark on the water, and I believe that 



FROM BARRACKS TO FRONT. II 

the deserter escaped safely. Early in the morn- 
ing, before it was light, I again heard firing. I 
was told that another recuit had jumped over- 
board and had been killed. 

In this steamboat were two mysterious men 
clad in soldiers' clothing, whom I had not seen 
until after we left Albany. Their appearance 
was so striking, they were so alert and quick- > _. 
eyed, so out of place among us, that my atten- f ^^ 
tion was attracted to them. One of these menf '. " -^ 
was an active, trim built, dark-eyed, blacl*^ | ^ 
haired, handsome fellow of 25 years. The other S \ Q^ 
was a stocky, red-faced blonde of about 36^^ PQ 
They moved quickly among the recruits. They\ii. ^ 
made pleasant, cheerful remarks to almost every'^^V^^ 
man on the steamboat. They told stories 
which were greatly enjoyed by the recruits who 
heard them. ^' Where did those two men join 
us ? Where did they come from, and who are 
they ?" were questions I musingly asked my- 
self over and over and over again, as I sat on 
my knapsack in a corner. Finally I walked to 
a guard and asked who they were. He eyed me 
suspiciously for an instant, and then furiously 
answered : '' Stand back, you bounty-jumping 
cur ! " and he lunged at me with his bayonet as 
though to thrust me through. I stood back, 




12 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE 

and then I sat down on my knapsack in a cor- 
ner and wondered musingly if I were a patriot 
or simply a young fool. 

Morning came, and we disembarked in New 
York, and were marched, still heavily guarded, 
to the low, white barracks, which then stood 
where the post-office now stands. There we 
were securely penned and decently fed. The 
men fretted and fumed, and burned to escape. 
Many of them had previously jumped bounties 
in New York. They knew the slums of the 
city. They knew w^iere to hide in safety. 
Dozens of them said that if they could get out 
of the barracks they would be safe. But they 
could not get out. This time they were going 
to the front. The officers and men, in whose 
charge we were, were resolute in their intention 
to deliver one consignment of bounty-jumpers 
to the commands they belonged to. That 
afternoon five days' cooked rations were issued 
to us, and we were escorted by a heavy double 
line of guards down Broadway to the Battery. 
There we turned to march along a street that 
led to a dock where an ocean steamer lay. The 
head of the column was opposite the dock, when 
four recruits shed their knapsacks and ran for 
the freedom they coveted. One of these men 



FROM BARRACKS TO FRONT. 1 3 

marched two files in front of me. He dashed 
past the guard, who walked by my side, at the 
top of his speed. Not a word was said to him. 
The column halted at command. The guard 
near me turned on his heels quickly, threw his 
heavy rifle to his shoulder, covered the running 
man, and shot him dead. Two of the remain- 
ing three fell dead as other rifles cracked. The 
fourth man ran through the shower of balls 
safely. I thought he was going to escape ; but 
a tall, lithe officer ran after him, pistol in hand. 
He overtook the fugitive ju&t as he was about 
to turn a street corner. He made no attempt 
to arrest the deserter, but placed his pistol to 
the back of the runaway's head and blew his 
brains out as he ran. The dead man fell in a 
pile at the base of a lamp-post. That ended 
all attempts to escape. We marched on board 
the steamer, a propeller, and descended narrow 
stairs to between decks, where the light was 
dim and the air heavy with a smell as of damp 
sea-weed. There were three large hatches, 
freight hatches probably, in the deck above us, 
through which the heavy, cold, outside air sank, 
and through which three systems of draughty, 
sneeze-provoking ventilation were established 
as soon as the air in the hold became heated. 



14 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE. 

Tobacco smoke arose from hundreds of pipes 
and cheap cigars, and the air grew hazy. At 
short distances the forms of men Avere indis- 
tinct and phantom-Hke. In this space were 
about 600 men. False history and dishonest 
Cons^ressmen who desire to secure re-election 
by gifts of public money and property to voters, 
say they were brave Northern youth going to 
the defence of their country. I, who know, 
say they were as arrant a gang of cowards, 
thieves, murderers, and blacklegs as were ever 
gathered inside the Avails of Newgate or Sing 
Sing. 

Money was plentiful and whiskey entered 
through the steamer's ports, and the guards 
drove a profitable business in selling canteens 
full of whiskey at $5 each. Promptly the hold 
was transformed into a floating hell. The air 
grew denser and denser with tobacco smoke. 
Drunken men staggered to and fro. They 
yelled and sung and danced, and then they 
fought and fought again. Rings were formed, 
and within them men pounded each other 
fiercely. They rolled on the slimy floor and 
howled and swore and bit and gouged, and the 
delighted spectators cheered them to redouble 
their efforts. Out of these fights others sprang 



FROM BARRACKS TO FRONT. 1 5 

into life, and from these still others. The noise 
was horrible. The wharf became crowded with 
men eager to know what was going on in the 
vessel. A tug was sent for, and we were towed 
into the river, and there the anchors were 
dropped. Guards ran in on us and beat men 
with clubbed rifles, and were in turn attacked. 
We drove them out of the hold. The hatch at the 
head of the stairs was closed and locked. The 
recruits were maddened with whiskey. Dozens 
of men ran a muck, striking every one they came 
to, and being struck and kicked and stamped 
on in return. The ventilation hatches were 
surrounded by stern^faced sentinels, who gazed 
into the gloom below and warned us not to try 
to get out by climbing through the hatches. 
Men sprang high in the air and clutched the 
hatch railings, and had their hands smashed 
with musket butts. Sentinels paced to and 
fro along the vessel's deck, and called loudly to 
all row-boats to keep off or they would be fired 
upon. They did not intend that any fresh sup- 
plies of whiskey should be brought to us. The 
prisoners in this floating hell were then told to 
" go it," and they went it. We had been 
searched for arms before we entered the bar- 
racks at Albany. The more decent and quiet 



1 6 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE. 

of us had no means of killing the drunken 
brutes who pressed on us. There was not a 
club or a knife or an iron bolt that we could 
lay our hands to. I fought, and got licked ; 
fought again, and won ; and for the third time 
faced my man, and got knocked stiff in two 
seconds. It was a scene to make a devil howl 
with delight. The light grew dimmer and dim- 
mer, and then the interior of the hold was 
dark, except such portions as were dimly lighted 
by the bars of light that shot through the 
ports and that which was reflected down the 
hatches in square columns. We fought and 
howled and swore with rage and pain. Through 
it all the smell was overpowering. The deadly, 
penetrating odors of ulcerous men, who suf- 
fered from unnamable diseases, of stale tobacco- 
smoke, the sickening fumes of dead whiskey, 
and the smell of many unclean ruffians made 
the air heavy with a horrible stench. Many 
recruits lost their bounty money. They were 
robbed and beaten almost to death. Exhaus- 
tion quieted the devils down during the night, 
and then we slept on the filthy floor. There 
was not a bunk in the entire hold. The next 
morning we awoke with sore heads and faint 
stomachs, and, under orders, washed out the 



FRO AT BARRACKS TO FRONT. 1/ 

vast room as well as we could. We remained 
in New York harbor for two days, waiting for 
the officer who had killed the runaway to be 
tried and acquitted. During the delay the 
guards refused to allow a row-boat to come near 
us. Then we started for Alexandria, in Vir- 
ginia. 

Shortly after we had begun to steam for the 
sea I saw the two alert-eyed recruits, who had 
attracted my attention when we were on the 
Hudson River steamboat, in the hold with us. 
I am positive that they were not with us while 
we lay in New York harbor. They walked 
among us for a couple of hours, talking pleas- 
antly. The younger of the twain inquired 
kindly as to how I got my face pounded, and 
he got me a bowl of clean water to bathe it in. 
Toward noon they produced chuck-luck cloths 
and dice boxes, and furious gambling began. 
I was the only man on board who was not 
bounty paid or laden. I had but §io, which 
my father had given to me when I was in the 
New York barracks, so I could not join in the 
sport. I have seen gambling — and wild, reck- 
less gambling too — in many mining camps, and 
in towns where Texas cattle were sold, and in 
new railroad towns beyond the Missouri ; but 



1 8 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE. 

never since the war closed have I seen such 
reckless gambling" as went on day and night in 
this vessel. Men crowded around the brace 
games, and speedily lost their bounties. Then 
the losers would boldly, In broad daylight, rob 
their comrades. I saw gangs of robbers knock 
men down and go through their pockets, and 
unbuckle money belts from their waists ; and if 
they protested, their cries were silenced with 
boot heels stamped into their faces. 

By the time this floating hell and its cargo of 
cowardly devils had got into Chesapeake Bay, 
the two alert-eyed gamblers possessed about all 
the money the six hundred recruits had. Then 
they grew fearful of the men they had robbed, 
and hired some of the soldiers to guard them. 
I saw two soldiers paid $ioo each for guarding 
them while they slept. Unguarded, they would 
have been killed and torn limb from limb. At 
Alexandria we, dirty and smelling so vilely that 
the street dogs refused to approach us, were 
marched to clean barracks and well fed. That 
evening I paid a soldier $5 to stand over a bath- 
tub and watch me while I bathed. I had to go 
outside of the barracks to bathe. The next 
morning the two alert-eyed gamblers were miss- 
ing. I never saw them again. I knew that 



FROM BARRACKS TO FRONT. 1 9 

they were not recruits, but gamblers in league 
with high officials — gamblers carefully selected 
for their professional skill and pleasing address, 
and that they had been sent on the sea-voyage 
to rob the bounty-laden recruits. The trip had 
been exceedingly profitable. At the lowest 
calculation there had been $240,000 in the re- 
cruits' pockets when they left New York. I do 
not believe the same pockets contained $70,000 
when we arrived at Alexandria. 

After breakfast we were counted, and the 
men of each regiment separated into groups 
and told to keep together. We were then 
marched under guard to a train of box-cars, and 
loaded into them much as cattle are. The in- 
terior of the car filled, the recruits were piled 
on top. At each of the side doors of the cars 
stood two armed sentinels. Two more sat on 
top outside at each end of the car. In the end 
car of the train were a couple of officers and 
fifteen or twenty privates. On the tender of 
the locomotive were more guards. We wxre 
solemnly told by an officer that any man who 
got off the car without permission would be 
shot dead. Five men did not believe this 
statement, or they may have been so greatly 
appalled by the prospect of meeting Lee's sol- 
diers, that they resolved to attempt to escape. 



20 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVA TE. 

Be that as it may, five men jumped from the 
train while it was in motion, and were instantly 
killed by the guards. The train was stopped 
and their corpses were thrown into the rear car. 
The men in the car I was in were ordered off 
at Brandy Station. We fell into line and were 
counted, and then turned over to other guards, 
whose officer receipted for us. We faced into 
column and marched from camp to camp, and 
at each camp some recruits were counted out 
as if they were sheep, and receipted for. Du- 
ring this march of distribution I learned where 
many regiments were camped, and I often vis- 
ited them before the campaign opened. 

I rather enjoyed the afternoon. My knap- 
sack was light (some patriot had stolen its con- 
tents while I slept on the steamer), the walking 
was good, the air was pure and sweet, the scene 
was novel and interesting ; and, above all, the 
propeller was at Alexandria. About 9 o'clock 
the last guard and I, now in friendly conversa- 
tion about the trip from Albany to the front, 
arrived at the camp of the Eleventh New York 
Battery, and I was receipted for. The next 
morning I drew a full outfit of clothing and 
burned the befouled garments I had worn on 
the '' Floating Heaven of American Patriots," 
as I named the propeller. 



II. 

IN CAMP AT BRANDY STATION. 

DURING the winter of 1863-64 the Army 
of the Potomac was camped In Vir- 
ginia north of the Rapidan River. A large 
portion of it was at Brandy Station. The en- 
listed men were comfortably housed in canvas- 
covered log huts. There was a large fireplace 
in each hut, and wood was abundant and to be 
had for the cutting. The old oak forests of 
Virginia, whose owners were gathered in ranks 
under Lee to oppose us, suffered that winter. 
When the weather was fit the soldiers were 
drilled, and drilled, and drilled'' again. We 
were well fed, having plenty of bread, fresh 
beef, salted pork, beans, rice, sugar, and coffee. 
In front of the ground on which the battery 
I belonged to was camped, was a large plain. 
On it several regiments, in heavy marching or- 
der, were drilled every pleasant day. Instead 
of practising the men in the simple flank and 

21 



22 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE. 

line movements used in battle, or at targets, or 
in estimating distances, they were marched to 
and fro and made to perform displayful evolu- 
tions, which conveyed the impression to the 
spectators that thousands of Knights Templar 
were moving in competitive drill for a valuable, 
and, maybe, sacred prize. In the artillery ser- 
vice the drill was still more absurd. Teams 
were hitched to the guns almost daily, and they 
were whirled over comparatively dry ground in 
a highly bewildering but exceedingly useless 
manner. Every enlisted man in the army knew 
that we were to fight in a rugged, wooded 
country where the clearings were surrounded 
by heavy forests, and where deep shrub and 
timber-clad ravines hazed the air, and where 
practice and practice and still more practice in 
estimating distances was required, if we were to 
fire accurately and effectively. Did the artil- 
lery officers zealously practise us in estimating 
distance ? Never, to my knowledge. They 
taught us how to change front to the right, to 
the rear, and on the several pieces that formed 
the battery, which knowledge was of as much 
practical use to us as if we had been assidu- 
ously drilled to walk on stilts or to play on the 
banjo. Never, while I was in the artillery 



IN CAMP AT BRANDY STATION. 23 

camp, did I see the guns unlimber for target 
practice. The dismounted, or gun drill, was 
useful ; but this, too, was loaded down with 
memory-clogging detail. 

One night, one of the gunners named Jellet 
and I sat late by the hut fireplace after an af- 
ternoon's hard work at the guns, and I, young 
in years and service, humbly suggested that I 
thought that much of the drill we were being 
taught was absurd and useless, and that there 
was not time before the spring campaign opened 
to teach the new recruits the entire light-artil- 
lery drill. Soberly, the corporal who had sighted 
the gun I served on through many battles, laid 
his hand on my shoulder and said impress- 
ively : 

*' My lad, you are just beginning to discover 
the artillery humbug. You serve in what 
should be the most efificient arm of the service; 
an arm where men and horses and guns should 
be wasted as water, where tons of ammunition 
should be expended in target practice, because 
if a gunner cannot hit the object he fires at he 
had better not fire at all, as to miss excites the 
contempt of the enemy. I have served for two 
years in this army," he added, after an instant's 
pause, '^ and there is not a general ofificer in it 



24 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVA TE. 

who understands how to use artillery, not one." 
Here the corporal swore roundly, and then he 
added, prophetically, as he solemnly nodded 
his head : '' Wait until you get into the field 
and your heart will be broken." Then he went 
to bed leaving me by the fire, where I sat and 
toasted myself until I heard a guard approach- 
ing the tent, then I turned in in full dress and 
was sleeping soundly w4ien the guard inquired 
why we had a light after taps. 

How tired I got of camp, and drill, and 
guard duty ! And how tired I got of the rain 
and mud! A large portion of the battery men 
were religious. Almost nightly these men held 
a prayer-meeting. Next to us, on the right, a 
battery manned by Irishmen was parked, and 
almost nightly they indulged in a fist fight. 
Once in a while they evinced a desire to fight 
with us, and at long intervals some of the un- 
regenerated men of our battery gratified them 
and got whipped. Still farther to the right a 
battery of the Fourth United States Artillery 
was parked. The men of that command were 
either Irish or Irish-Americans, and they were 
keen to gratify the desire of volunteer Irish, or 
any other volunteers, to indulge in personal 
combat. To our left a full regiment of Ger- 



IN CAMP AT BRANDY STATION. 25 

mans, heavy-artillery men, were camped. Be- 
tween them and the regular army artillerymen 
a bloody feud existed. Many and many a Ger- 
man was savagely beaten by the Irishmen. 
This regiment of Germans interested me great- 
ly. In their camp I first saw lager beer. I 
bought a glass of it, but finding it a weak, sloppy 
drink, I left the almost full glass on the coun- 
ter. So strong an impression did this first 
drink of lager make on me, that I never see the 
foamy, amber-colored liquor that the sutler's 
tent, standing on a muddy plain, and surround- 
ed by stout, blue-coated Germans, does not arise 
before me. These Germans had a vast amount 
of personal property. They had recently ar- 
rived from the fortifications near Washington, 
and had brouc^ht their accumulated wealth 
with them. All of the enlisted men had one 
knapsack, and many of them had two, and 
there was a plenty of musical instruments in 
their camp. I used to look into my lean knap- 
sack after a visit to the Germans, and wish it 
would bulge with fatness as theirs did. This 
regiment of Germans made more noise in their 
camp than two brigades of Americans would or 
could have done. 

One day I was walking near the camp of Bat- 



26 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE. 

tery A, Fourth United States Artillery. Some 
of the men of that command were drunk, and 
among them was a line sergeant, a sturdy, blue- 
eyed, black-haired Scotchman. He was wildly 
drunk, but not staggering. He had full control 
of himself physically, but mentally he was a 
madman. He cursed loudly, and swaggered 
with vehement gesticulation around the camp. 
I saw a door of a tent thrown open and a hand- 
some young officer stepped out. He was neat, 
erect, quick-stepping, and sharp-voiced. 

" Sergeant of the guard ! " he called loudly. 

A sergeant stepped up and saluted. 

" Put a gag in Sergeant Stewart's mouth, and 
then tie him on a spare wheel and give it a 
quarter turn ! " the sharp-voiced officer said 
loudly. 

The sergeant of the guard saluted again and 
turned to obey. Stewart heard the order, and 
turned without saluting and ran at the top 
of his speed to a large tree that stood a few 
hundred yards off on the plain. When he 
reached the tree he nimbly swung himself up- 
ward into its lower limbs, and speedily climbed 
to the top. Once there, he drew a heavy re- 
volver and promptly opened fire on the sergeant 
of the guard and his detachment. He checked 



IN CAMP AT BRANDY STATION. 2/ 

the pursuit. Then he howled and swore, and 
amused himself by shooting at strange horse^ 
men who happened to come within range. The 
quick-stepping, alert-eyed officer came to us 
and asked the cause of the delay in catching 
Stewart. On being answered, he walked toward 
the tree. Stewart emptied his revolver at 
him and missed him. He grasped the useless 
weapon by the barrel and waited until he got a 
fair chance, and then launched it at his offi- 
cer, who stepped aside to avoid it. He walked 
under the tree. 

" Sergeant Stewart, come down ! " he com- 
manded. 

'' To be tied on the wheel ? " Stewart in- 
quired. 

'' Yes ; to be gagged and tied on the wheel," 
the officer replied. 

'' Then I '11 not come down," the sergeant 
resolutely said. 

The officer drew his revolver, covered Stewart 
with it, and said sternly : 

'' Come down, or I will kill you." 

'' I '11 not come down," said Stewart. You 
can kill me, but you cannot tie me up," And 
Stewart glared savagely at the officer and 
whooped exultantly. 



28 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE. 

The rage of the officer was intense. He 
lowered his revolver and swore that he would 
tie him on a wheel, and that he would not 
gratify him by killing him. 

*' Go to the battery wagon and bring some 
axes here," he said sharply to a corporal. The 
axes were brought and two men began to chop 
the tree down. Sergeant Stewart did not fancy 
the prospect of riding on an oak tree as it swung 
through the air and crashed on the earth. He 
began to parley. Would his officer kindly shoot 
him if he came down ? No, he would not. 
Would he not order his head to be cut off? 
No, he would not. Stewart descended limb by 
limb, and at every limb he tried to have the 
disgraceful sentence mitigated to death. His 
officer was obdurate. He was resolute in his 
intention to gag him and tie him on a wheel. 
Stewart finally sat on a lower limb. Any of 
the men could have taken him by the legs and 
pulled him down. He wanted that done. That 
would have been capture, not surrender. He 
was not gratified. He had to climb down. 
Then he was marched to a spare wheel and 
strapped on it, previously having a heavy gag 
thrust crossways into his mouth and bound 
firmly in its position. I was amazed that 



IN CAMP AT BRANDY STATION. 29 

Stewart had not been shot. I talked to the 
men and they told me that he was the best 
sergeant in the battery, a marvellous shot with 
a Napoleon gun and that his getting drunk 
was an accident. 

'^ Oh," exclaimed a gray-haired private who 
had three service stripes on his coat sleeve," he 
will be court-martialled and get three years at 
the Dry Tortugas, Before the sentence is re- 
ceived here, the battery will be in the field and 
Stewart at his gun. The officers will not pub- 
lish the order, but will hold it over him. If he 
again gets drunk or becomes insubordinate, 
then he will catch it." 

When I left the camp of the regulars Stewart 
was hanging on the wheel and the men were 
drilling at the guns, and no one was paying a 
particle of attention to Stewart's inarticulate 
cries and acute suffering. Here I will say that 
the prediction made by the private whose coat 
sleeves were covered with service stripes came 
true. After I was promoted into the regular 
army I served with Battery A, Fourth Artillery, 
and Sergeant Stewart was then a line sergeant. 
He got drunk and attacked an officer with a 
tent pole, and the old sentence of the court 
which tried him at Brandy Station was put into 



30 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVA TE. 

execution. He was sent to the Dry Tortugas 
for three years. 

The discipline throughout the Army of the 
Potomac during the winter of 1863-64 was 
necessarily severe. The ranks of the original 
volunteers, the men who sprang to arms at the 
tap of the northern war-drum, had been shot to 
pieces. Entire platoons had disappeared. Regi- 
ments that had entered the great camps of in- 
struction formed around Washington in 1861- 
62 a thousand men strong, had melted before the 
heat of Confederate battle-fire till they num- 
bered three hundred, two hundred, and as low 
as one hundred and fifty men. During the win- 
ter of 1863-64 these regiments were being filled 
with bounty-jumpers, and these men had to be 
severely disciplined, and that entailed punish- 
ment. There was no longer the friendly feel- 
ing of cordial comradeship between the enlisted 
men and their officers, which was one of the 
distinguishing characteristics of the volunteer 
troops. The whole army was rapidly assuming 
the character and bearing of regular troops, and 
that means mercenaries. The lines drawn be- 
tween the recruits of 1863-64 and their officers 
were well marked, and they were rigid. The 
officers were resolute in their intention to make 



IN CAMP AT BRANDY STATION. 3 1 

the recruits feel the difference in their rank. 
Breaches of army discipline were promptly and 
severely punished. There is an unwritten mil- 
itary axiom which says that frequent courts- 
martial convened to try enlisted men for petty 
offences, sharply indicate that the regimental 
officers are inefficient. There was no complaint 
on this score in the Army of the Potomac in 
1863-64. There was no necessity for punish- 
ing the volunteers. They were men of high 
intelligence. They could be reasoned with. 
They could and did see the necessity of soldier- 
like and decent behavior in their camps. They 
cheerfully obeyed orders, because they realized 
the necessity of obedience. But with large 
bounties came a different class of recruits, the 
bounty-jumpers. These men had to be heart- 
lessly moulded into soldiers. And, while it is 
true that the apparently trutal methods em- 
ployed to check the insolent tongues and to 
curb the insubordinate spirits of these men did 
succeed in creating the outward semblance of 
soldiers, it is also true that no earthly power 
could change the character of their hearts ; and 
they were essentially cowardly. The bounty- 
jumpers would cheerfully engage in savage 
rows ; they would fight fiercely with their fists, 



32 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE. 

but they could not and did not stand battle-fire 
stanchly. 

The punishments inflicted on the enlisted 
men were various, and some of them were hor- 
ribly brutal and needlessly severe ; but they 
apparently served their purpose, and the times 
w^ere cruel, and men had been hardened to bear 
the suffering of other men without wincing. 
One punishment much affected in the light 
artillery was called '' tying on the spare 
wheel." Springing upward and rearward from 
the centre rail of every caisson was a fifth axle, 
and on it was a spare wheel. A soldier who 
had been insubordinate was taken to the spare 
wheel and forced to step upon it. His legs 
were drawn apart until they spanned three 
spokes. His arms were stretched until there 
were three or four spokes between his hands. 
Then feet and hands were firmly bound to the 
felloes of the wheel. If the soldier was to be 
punished moderately he was left, bound in an 
upright position on the wheel for five or six 
hours. If the punishment was to be severe, the 
ponderous wheel was given a quarter turn after 
the soldier had been lashed to it, which changed 
the position of the man being punished from 
an upright to a horizontal one. Then the pris- 



IN CAMP AT BRANDY STATION. 33 

oner had to exert all his strength to keep his 
weight from pulling heavily and cuttingly on 
the cords that bound his upper arm and leg to 
the wheel. I have frequently seen men faint 
while undergoing this punishment, and I have 
known men to endure it for hours without a 
murmur, but with white faces, and set jaws and 
blazing eyes. To cry out, to beg for mercy, to 
protest, ensured additional discomfort in the 
shape of a gag, a rough stick, being tied into 
the suffering man's mouth. Tying on the spare 
wheel was the usual punishment in the artillery 
service for rather serious offences ; and no man 
wanted to be tied up but once. 

There was another punishment which was 
much more severe than the spare wheel, and 
which, because it was apt to cripple the men 
physically, was very rarely employed. This 
was known as " tying on the rack." Back of 
every battery wagon is a heavy, strong rack, on 
which forage is carried. It stands out about 
two feet behind the wheels. Its edge is not 
over an inch thick. The soldier who was to 
suffer the tortures of the rack was led to it. 
His hands were dragged forward as far as they 
could be without lifting his feet from the 
ground, and there they were bound to the 



34 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE. 

felloes of the wheel. Then one foot was lifted 
and bound to the felloe of one wheel, then the 
other foot was bound to the felloe of the other 
wheel. The whole weight of the soldier was 
thrown on his chest, which bore heavily against 
the sharp edge of the rack. It is almost un- 
necessary to say that a gag was strapped into 
the prisoner's mouth to prevent articulation, 
before he was extended on the rack. No man 
could endure the supreme pain inflicted by this 
torture without screaming. I have seen a 
strong and most determined man faint in less 
than ten minutes under the strain of this severe 
and brual punishment, to be cut down and 
never again twirl sponge staff. I have heard 
men beg to be killed rather than to be tied on 
the rack. 

To be bucked and gagged ? Yes, that was 
severe, but not dangerous. It was highly dis- 
agreeable and painful, too, if prolonged, and at 
all times calculated to make a man's eyes stick 
out of his head as lobsters' eyes do. And then 
the appearance of a man while undergoing the 
punishment was highly discreditable. The sol- 
dier about to be bucked and gagged, generally 
a drunken or noisy soldier, was forced to sit on 
the ground ; his knees were drawn up to his 



IN CAMP AT BRANDY STATION. 35 

chin, then his hands were drawn forward to his 
shins, and there they were securely bound to- 
gether. A long stick was then thrust under his 
knees and over his arms. A gag was then 
securely bound in his mouth. The soldier who 
was bucked and gagged could not hurt himself 
or any one else. He could not speak, but he 
could make inarticulate sounds indicative of his 
suffering, and he invariably made them before 
he was released. 

Daily many men were tied up by the thumbs, 
and that was far from pleasant. The impudent 
bounty-jumper who had stood on his toes under 
a tree for a couple of hours to keep his weight 
off of his thumbs, which were tied to a limb 
over his head, was exceedingly apt to heed the 
words of his ofificers when next they spoke to 
him. The bounty-jumper lacked the moral 
qualities which could be appealed to in an 
honest endeavor to create a soldier out of a 
ruffian; but his capacity to suffe-r physically was 
unimpaired, and that had to be played upon. 

Then there was the utterly useless and 
shoulder-chafing punishment of carrying a stick 
of cord-wood. The stick that one picked up so 
cheerfully, and stepped off with so briskly, and 
walked up and down before a sentinel with so 



2,6 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVA TE. 

gayly in the early morning, had an unaccount- 
able property of growing heavier and heavier 
as the sun rose higher and higher. One morn- 
ing at ten o'clock I dropped a stick that did not 
weigh more than twelve pounds at sunrise. I 
sat down by it and turned it over and over. It 
had not grown, but I was then willing to swear 
that it had gained one hundred and eighty- 
eight pounds in weight during the time I had 
carried it. 

One evening in March an order which in- 
vested General U. S. Grant with the command 
of all the armies of the United States was read 
to us. That night we talked long and earnestly 
about our new general, and wondered what 
manner of a man he was. Old soldiers, who 
had seen many military reputations — reputa- 
tions which had been made in subordinate 
commands or in distant regions occupied by 
inferior Confederate troops — melt before the 
battle-fire of the Army of Northern Virginia, and 
expose the incapacity of our generals, shrugged 
their shoulders carelessly, and said indifferently ; 
*' Well, let Grant try what he can accomplish 
with the Army of the Potomac. He cannot be 
worse than his predecessors; and, if he is a 
fighter, he can find all the fighting he wants. 



IN CAMP AT BRANDY STATION. 2>7 

We have never complained that Lee's men 
would not fight. Whatever faults they may 
have, cowardice is not one of them. We wel- 
come Grant. He cannot be weaker or more 
inefificient than the generals who have wasted 
the lives of our comrades during the past three 
years." But Grant's name aroused no enthu- 
siasm. The Army of the Potomac had passed 
the enthusiastic stage, and was patiently wait- 
ing to be led to victory or to final defeat. 

The enlisted men thorougly discussed Grant's 
military capacity. Magazines, illustrated papers, 
and newspapers, which contained accounts of 
his military achievements, were sent for, and 
were eagerly and attentively read. I have seen 
an artillery private quickly sketch the water- 
courses of the West in the sand with a pointed 
stick, and ridge up the earth with his hands to 
represent mountain chains, and then seize suc- 
cessive handfuls of earth and drop them in 
little piles to represent Forts Henry and Donel- 
son, and Pittsburg Landing, Vicksburg, and 
Chattanooga. And then the enlisted men 
would gather around the sketch and take sides 
for and against Grant as the story of the battle 
was read aloud from a newspaper. These dis- 
cussions were fruitless but combat-provoking, 



38 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE. 

and frequently the wranglers adjourned to a 
secluded spot outside of the camp and fought 
it out with their fists. One thing about Grant's 
assuming command of the Army of the Potomac 
that no private I talked with liked, and I talked 
with hundreds, was the duality of command. 
Meade was retained in command of the Army 
of the Potomac, and all orders affecting the 
army came through him. Still Grant was with 
us, and in command of the Potomac army, as 
well as of all other armies. There was a division 
of responsibility in the division of authority 
which impressed the enlisted men unfavorably. 
It looked as though the generals were hedging 
against future mistakes and disasters. 

With Grant came stricter discipline and re- 
cruits by the thousand. Throughout April 
there was great activity in all our camps along 
the Rapidan. The army was reorganized, and 
many generals were sent to Washington for 
orders, and we saw no more of them. Staff 
officers constantly rode to and fro. Inspector- 
generals were busy. There was a mysterious 
hum and bustle in all our camps. At all the 
railroad stations long trains of cars, filled with 
provisions and forage, were unloaded. White- 
capped wagons, loaded with hard bread and 



IN CAMP AT BRANDY STATION. 39 

barrels of salted pork, rolled heavily into regi- 
mental and battery camps. We knew that 
battle was near. 

On the evening of May 3d we fell in for 
dress parade. Up and down the immense 
camp we could see regiment after regiment, 
battery after battery, fall into line. The bu- 
gles rang out clearly in the soft spring air, dis- 
tant drums beat, and trumpets blared. Then 
there was silence most profound. We listened 
attentively to the orders to march. To the 
right, to the left, in the distance before us, and 
far behind us, cheers arose. Battery after bat- 
tery, regiment after regiment, cheered until the 
men were hoarse. My comrades did not cheer. 
They seemed to be profoundly impressed, but 
not in the least elated. The wonted silence of 
the evening was repeatedly broken by the re- 
sounding shouts of distant troops, who could 
not contain their joy that the season of inac- 
tivity was over, and the campaign, which we 
all hoped would be short and decisive, was 
opened. That night many unwonted fires 
burned, and we knew that the veteran troops 
were destroying the camp equipage which they 
did not intend to carry. 

Jellet, the gunner of the piece I served on. 



40 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE. 

came to me that evening, and kindly looked 
into my knapsack, and advised me as to what 
to keep and what to throw away. He cut my 
kit down to a change of underclothing, three 
pairs of socks, a pair of spare shoes, three 
plugs of navy tobacco, a rubber blanket, and a 
pair of woollen blankets. 

" Now, my lad, Jellet said, " do not pick up 
any thing, excepting food and tobacco, while 
you are on the march. Get hold of all the 
food you can. Cut haversacks from dead men. 
Steal them from infantrymen if you can. Let 
your aim be to secure food and food and still 
more food, and keep your eyes open for tobac- 
co. Do not look at clothing or shoes or blank- 
ets. You can always draw those articles from 
the quartermaster. Stick to your gun through 
thick and thin. Do not straggle. Fill your 
canteen at every stream we cross and wherever 
you get a chance elsewhere. Never wash your 
feet until the day's march is over. If you do, 
they will surely blister." And here Jellet be- 
came highly impressive and shook his index 
finger at me warningly and solemnly, '^ and," 
he said, " get hold of food, and hang on to it ; 
you will need it." 

The next morning we had our things packed 



IN CAMP AT BRANDY STATION. 4 1 

and our breakfast eaten by sunrise. Our use- 
less plunder was piled up ; to each bundle was 
fastened a tag, on which was the name of its 
owner. The pile was turned over to the bat- 
tery quartermaster, who said he would take 
good care of the property. He did, too — such 
good care that we never again saw a particle of 
it. I wanted to burn the camp, but the old 
soldiers who had fought under McClellan, and 
Burnside, and Hooker, and Meade, and Pope, 
scornfully snubbed me. They said : " Leave 
things as they are " and they added, signifi- 
cantly : " We may want them before snow 
flies." 



III. 



MARCHING TO THE BATTLE OF THE WILDER- 
NESS. 

AT dawn on May 4, 1864, General Grant's 
last campaign opened. The enlisted 
men of the battery I served with ate breakfast 
and struck their camp at Brandy Station before 
sunrise. It was a beautiful morning, cool and 
pleasant. The sun arose above an oak forest 
that stood to the east of us, and its rays caused 
thousands of distant rifle barrels and steel bay- 
onets to glisten as fire points. In all directions 
troops were falling into line. The air resounded 
with the strains of martial music. Standards 
were unfurled and floated lazily in the light 
wind. Regiments fell into line on the plain 
before us. We could see officers sitting on 
their horses before them, as though making 
brief speeches to their soldiers, and then the 
banners would wave, and the lines face to the 
right into column of fours and march off ; and 

42 



MARCHING TO THE BATTLE. 43 

then the sound of exultant cheering would 
float to us. Short trains of white-capped and 
dust-raising wagons rolled across the plain. 
The heavy-artillery regiment of Germans serv- 
ing as infantry, which had been encamped to 
our left during the winter, fell into line. We 
light-artillery men laughed to see the burdens 
these sturdy men had on their backs. All of 
the enlisted men of that regiment had one 
knapsack strapped on their broad backs, and 
many of them had two. A sturdy, kindly 
race, the Germans, and tenacious in holding on 
to property ; but in those days they were igno- 
rant of the power of a southern sun, and of 
the mysterious quality it possesses to cause 
men to loathe personal property which they 
have to carry on their shoulders, and to cast it 
carelessly by the roadside. Jellet, the gunner 
of the piece I served on, joined me as I stood 
leaning against a cool gun, watching the Ger- 
mans make ready for a campaign. He smiled, 
and said, significantly : ^' They will throw away 
those loads before they camp to-night." A 
word of command rang out in front of their 
regiment. They faced to the right and marched 
toward Ely's Ford of the Rapidan, and toward 
the Wilderness that lay beyond. " Boots and 



44 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE. 

saddles !" was cheerily blown. The light-artil- 
lery men stood to their guns. The horses were 
harnessed and hitched in, the drivers mounted, 
and we moved off to take position in the 
column directly behind the heavily-laden Ger- 
mans. We were in high spirits ; indeed we 
were frisky, and walked along gayly. The 
men talked of the coming battle, and they sang 
songs about the soul of John Brown, alleged to 
be marching on, songs indicative of a desire 
to hang Jeff. Davis to a sour apple-tree. The 
Germans were, as usual, full of song and ex- 
ceedingly noisy. I irritably expressed a wish 
that they would be quiet. Jellet sagely ad- 
vised me, saying : *' Wait ; take it easy. I know 
the road we are to march on. There will be no 
singing in that regiment this afternoon." But 
Jellet, the dear old boy, was always advising 
impatient young men "" to take it easy," " to 
wait a bit," and '^ don't fret," and, as there 
was nothing else to do, the young men invari- 
ably followed Jellet's advice. 

We marched toward Ely's Ford pretty 
steadily for a couple of hours. As we drew 
near it, we saw that the troops were beginning 
to jam around its approaches. They were 
being massed quicker than they could cross. 



MARCHING TO THE BATTLE. 45 

We halted at a short distance from the ford 
and impatiently waited for our turn to cross. 
Once over the river we would be in column 
and in our proper place. I noticed that the 
Germans in our front were sitting on their 
knapsacks engaged in mopping their faces with 
red handkerchiefs. And I also noticed that as 
the sun swung higher and higher toward the 
zenith their songs retired within their hairy- 
throats. I mentioned these, to me, interesting 
facts to Jellet, and he tapped his nose signifi- 
cantly with his index finger and said : '^ Wait 
a bit. We will lay in provisions from those 
fellows soon." And then he smiled as he laid 
down the military law designed to guide the 
conduct of light-artillery men on the march : 
" Get food, honestly if you can, but get it ; and 
ever remember that we cannot have too much 
of it in the battery." 

A staff officer rode out of the apparently 
confused mass of men jammed around the ford, 
and galloped toward us. As he passed the 
German soldiers, they slowly arose and, resum- 
ing their back-breaking burdens, marched off. 
The staff officer rode to us, and told our cap- 
tain to follow the Germans closely. This gold- 
laced youth of the staff had a look of import- 



46 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE. 

ance on his face that made us all smile. His 
manner was as though he that morning, single- 
handed and before breakfast, had vanquished 
a couple of maiden-devouring dragons. We 
crossed the Rapidan on a pontoon bridge, and 
filled our canteens and drank deeply as we 
crossed. Then we marched over a narrow strip 
of valley land ; then came a long, steep hill 
that led up to the comparatively level table- 
land of the Wilderness. This was the hill that 
caused the Germans to part with their personal 
property. Spare knapsacks, bursting with rich- 
ness, were cast aside near its base. Blankets, 
musical instruments, spare boots, and innumer- 
able articles of doubtful utility outcropped 
about half way up the hill. This float sharply 
indicated that the lead, when we discovered it, 
would be a rich one. Near the top of the hill 
we found many well-filled haversacks, and we 
picked up every one of them and hung them 
on the limbers and caissons and guns. The 
mine was rich, and we worked it thoroughly. 
Now we began to come on stragglers — men who 
had overloaded themselves, or who were soft 
and unfit to march in their gross condition. 
These men, with flushed faces and shirts open 
at the neck, gazed enviously at us as we light- 



MARCHING TO THE BATTLE. 47 

artillery men walked jauntily by. We felt it a 
duty to tenderly inquire into the condition of 
the health of these exhausted men, and did so 
pleasantly ; but they, the ill-conditioned per- 
sons, resented our expressions of love and pity 
as though they had been insulting remarks. 

On the upland we marched briskly. I saw 
no inhabitants in this region. They had fled 
before our advance, abandoning their homes. 
The soil was poor and thin, and the fields were 
covered with last year's dead grass, and this 
grass was burning as we passed by. I saw the 
burning grass fire fences and sweep into the 
woods ; and I wondered, as tiny whirwinds 
formed and carried revolving columns of sparks 
through the battery, if the caissons and limber 
chests were spark-tight. As none of the men 
seemed to be in the least alarmed at the near 
presence of fire, I ceased to worry, willing to 
take my chances if an explosion occurred. We 
marched steadily until the old Chancellorsville 
House was in sight. Many of the trees stand- 
ing around us were bullet-scarred. We stood 
idly in the road for some time, then went on 
for a few hundred yards, and parked in a field 
by the road, with the Germans in camp ahead 
of us. Beyond them brigades of troops lay 



48 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVA TE. 

restfully around their camp-fires. Other troops 
marched by rapidly, and late into the night the 
belated men trod heavily past our camp. 

During the day we had occasionally heard 
the faint report of distant rifles or the heavy, 
muffled report of a gun, and we suspected that 
our cavalry was feeling of Lee's men, who were 
intrenched near Mine Run, but whose pickets 
were all over the adjacent country. All of the 
enHsted men hoped that they would get 
through the Wilderness — a rugged, broken 
area of upland that extends from the Rapidan 
River close to Spottsylvania — without fighting. 
The timber is dense and scrubby, and the 
whole region is cut up by a labyrinth of roads 
which lead to clearings of charcoal pits and 
there end. Deep ravines, thickly clad with 
brush and trees, furrow the forest. The Con- 
federates knew the region thoroughly. Many 
of their soldiers had worked in the region, 
which is a mineral one. They knew where the 
roads led to, where the water was, where the 
natural line of defence was. We knew nothing, 
excepting that the Army of the Potomac, under 
Hooker, had once encountered a direful dis- 
aster on the outskirts of this desolate region. 
On all sides I heard the murmur of the enlisted 



MARCHING TO THE BATTLE. 49 

men as they expressed the hope that they 
would not have to fight in the Wilderness. 

In the evening, after supper, I walked with a 
comrade to the spot where General Pleasanton 
had massed his guns and saved the army under 
Hooker from destruction, by checking the im- 
petuous onslaught of Stonewall Jackson's Vir- 
ginian infantry, fresh from the pleasures of the 
chase of the routed Eleventh Corps. We walked 
to and fro over the old battle-field, looking at 
bullet-scarred and canister-riven trees. The 
men who had fallen in that fierce fight had ap- 
parently been buried where they fell, and buried 
hastily. Many polished skulls lay on the 
ground. Leg bones, arm bones, and ribs 
could be found without trouble. Toes of 
shoes, and bits of faded, weather-worn uni- 
forms, and occasionally a grinning, bony, flesh- 
less face peered through the low mound that 
had been hastily thrown over these brave war- 
riors. As we wandered to and fro over the 
battle-ground, looking at the gleaming skulls 
and whitish bones, and examining the exposed 
clothing of the dead to see if they had been 
Union or Confederate soldiers, many infantry- 
men joined us. It grew dark, and we built a 
fire at which to light our pipes close to where 



50 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE. 

we thought Jackson's men had formed for the 
charge, as the graves were thickest there, and 
then we talked of the battle of the preceding 
year. We sat on long, low mounds. The 
dead were all around us. Their eyeless skulls 
seemed to stare steadily at us. The smoke 
drifted to and fro among us. The trees swayed 
and sighed gently in the soft wind. One vet- 
eran told the story of the burning of some of 
the Union soldiers who were wounded during 
Hooker's fight around the Wilderness, as they 
lay helpless in the woods. It was a ghastly 
and awe-inspiring tale as he vividly told it to us 
as we sat among the dead. This man finished 
his story by saying shudderingly : 

" This region," indicating the woods beyond 
us with a wave of his arm, " is an awful place 
to fight in. The utmost extent of vision is 
about one hundred yards. Artillery cannot be 
used effectively. The wounded are liable to 
be burned to death. I am willing to take my 
chances of getting killed, but I dread to have 
a leg broken and then to be burned slowly ; 
and these woods will surely be burned if we 
fight here. I hope we will get through this 
chapparal without fighting," and he took off 
his cap and meditatively rubbed the dust off 



MARCHING TO THE BATTLE. 5 1 

of the red clover leaf which indicated the divi- 
sion and corps he belonged to. As we sat 
silently smoking and listening to the story, an 
infantry soldier who had, unobserved by us, 
been prying into the shallow grave he sat on 
with his bayonet, suddenly rolled a skull on 
the ground before us, and said in a deep, low 
voice : " That is what you are all coming to, 
and some of you will start toward it to-mor- 
row." It was growing late, and this uncanny 
remark broke up the group, most of the men 
going to their regimental camps. A few of us 
still sat by the dying embers and smoked. As 
we talked we heard picket-firing, not brisk, but 
at short intervals the faint report of a rifle 
quickly answered. And we reasoned correctly 
that a Confederate skirmish line was in the 
woods, and that battle would be offered in the 
timber. The intelligent enlisted men of the 
Second Corps with whom I talked that night 
listened attentively to the firing, now rising, 
now sinking into silence, to again break out in 
another place. All of them said that Lee was 
going to face Grant in the Wilderness, and they 
based their opinion on the presence of a Con- 
federate skirmish line in the woods. And all 
of them agreed that the advantages of position 



52 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE. 

were with Lee, and that his knowledge of the 
region would enable him to face our greatly- 
superior army in point of numbers, with a fair 
prospect of success. But every infantry soldier 
I talked with was resolute in his purpose to 
fight desperately and aid to win a victory that 
would end the war, if it was possible to win it. 
In all our armies in the civil war there was 
among the enlisted men, the volunteers, a sys- 
tem of gathering and distributing news that 
beat the information we received from division 
and corps head-quarters both in time and accu- 
racy. The system was paralleled by that of 
the slaves who walked the plantations lying 
within the Confederacy, o' nights. These army 
news-reporters who walked through the camps 
at night to meet other soldiers and gather in- 
telligence and discuss the campaign, were al- 
most invariably Americans. I cannot recall 
■fever having met, on these night ranges, men of 
other nationality. There was a burning desire 
among these men to know how other commands 
fared, and to gather accurate information, so as 
to correctly judge of the battle's tide, the prog- 
ress of the campaign, and the morale of the 
army. The enlisted men knew of defeats and 
successes long before they were published in 



MARCHING TO THE BATTLE 53 

general orders. The truth is that the privates 
of the army — the volunteers without bounty I 
mean — never believed a report that was pub- 
lished from head-quarters, unless it corresponded 
with the information the '^ camp-walkers " had 
gathered. It was surprising how quickly im- 
portant news relative to a battle or the cam- 
paign spread throughout the army. The news 
was carried from camp-fire to camp-fire at 
night, and it was generally reliable and won- 
derfully full and accurate. Often as I sat by the 
camp-fire, talking with my comrades, I have 
seen shadowy forms hurrying rapidly through 
the woods, or along the roads, and I knew men 
who were hungry for authentic news were beat- 
ing the camps and battle-line to obtain it. 
Frequently these figures would halt, and then, 
seeing our fire with men around it, they would 
issue forth from the woods and join us. They 
would sit down, fill their pipes, light them with 
glowing coals, and then, with their rifles lying 
across their knees, ask for the Second Corps 
news, inquire as to our losses, and whether we 
had gained or lost ground, and what Confeder- 
ate command was opposed to us. They would 
anxiously inquire as to the truth of rumors of 
disaster which they might have heard during 



54 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE. 

the day. They would listen attentively to 
what we said, and it was a point of honor not 
to give false information to these men. And 
then they would briefly tell the Fifth, or Sixth, 
or Ninth Corps news, and quickly disappear 
in the darkness. I have often, after a day's 
service at the guns, walked three miles in the 
dark to verify a rumor that affected our safety. 
With no disrespect to these natural-born sol- 
diers and most intelligent men do I record the 
seemingly incongruous truth, that it was neces- 
sary to closely watch army news-gatherers. 
One and all they would steal haversacks. 
They invariably combined predatory raids on 
other men's portable property with news- 
gathering. To rob a soldier was to rob a man 
who might be killed next day, and would not 
need property. 

It was past midnight when I crept under the 
caisson of my gun and pillowed my head on my 
knapsack. The distant rifle-shots on the 
picket-line grew fainter and fainter, then were 
lost in the nearer noises of the camps, and I 
slept. 



IV. 

THE BATTLE OF THE WILDERNESS. 



'' I ^HE next morning I was awakened by a 
J_ bugle call to find the battery I belonged 
to almost ready to march. I hurriedly toasted 
a bit of pork and ate it, and quickly chewed 
down a couple of hard tack, and drank deeply 
from my canteen, and was ready to march when 
the battery moved. It was a delightful morn- 
ing. Almost all the infantry which had been 
camped around us the previous evening had 
disappeared. We struck into the road, passed 
the Chancellorsville House, turned to the right, 
and marched up a broad turnpike toward the 
Wilderness forest. After marching on this 
road for a short distance we turned to the 
left on an old dirt road, which led obliquely 
into the woods. The picket firing had in- 
creased in volume since the previous evening, 
and there was no longer any doubt that we 
were to fight in the Wilderness. The firing 

55 



56 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVA TE. 

was a pretty brisk rattle, and steadily increas- 
ing in volume. About ten o'clock in the morn- 
ing the soft spring air resounded with a fierce 
yell, the sound of which was instantly drowned 
by a roar of musketry, and we knew that the 
battle of the Wilderness had opened. The bat- 
tery rolled heavily up the road into the woods 
for a short distance, when we were met by a 
staff officer, who ordered us out, saying : 

*' The battle has opened in dense timber. 
Artillery cannot be used. Go into park in 
the field just outside of the woods." 

We turned the guns and marched back and 
went into park. Battery after battery joined 
us, some coming out of the woods and others 
up the road from the Chancellorsville House, 
until some hundred guns or more were parked 
in the field. We were then the reserve artillery. 

Ambulances and wagons loaded with medical 
supplies galloped on the field, and a hospital 
was established behind our guns. Soon men, 
singly and in pairs or in groups of four or five, 
came limping slowly or walking briskly, with 
arms across their breasts and their hands 
clutched into their blouses, out of the woods. 
Some carried their rifles. Others had thrown 
them away. All of them were bloody. They 



THE BATTLE OF THE WILDERNESS. 57 

slowly filtered through the immense artillery 
park and asked, with bloodless lips, to be 
directed to a hospital. Powder smoke hung 
high above the trees in thin clouds. The noise 
in the woods was terrific. The musketry was a 
steady roll, and high above it sounded the in- 
spiring charging cheers and yells of the now 
thoroughly excited combatants. At intervals 
we could hear the loud report of Napoleon 
guns, and we thought that Battery K of the 
Fourth United States Artillery was in action. 
By eleven o'clock the wounded men were com- 
ing out of the woods in streams, and they had 
various tales to tell. Bloody men from the 
battle-line of the Fifth Corps trooped through 
our park supporting more severely wounded 
comrades. The battle, these men said, did not 
incline in our favor. They insisted that the Con- 
federates were in force, and that they, having 
the advantage of position and knowledge of the 
region, had massed their soldiers for the attack 
and outnumbered us at the points of conflict. 
They described the Confederate fire as wonder- 
fully accurate. One man who had a ghastly 
flesh wound across his forehead said : '' The 
Confederates are shooting to kill this time. 
Few of their balls strike the trees higher than 



58 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE, 

ten feet from the ground. Small trees are al- 
ready falling, having been cut down by rifle 
balls. There is hardly a Union battery in ac- 
tion," he added, after an instant's pause. 

By noon I was quite wild with curiosity, and, 
confident that the artillery would remain in 
park, I decided to go to the battle-line and 
see what was going on. I neglected to ask my 
captain for permission to leave the battery, be- 
cause I feared he would not grant my request, 
and I did not want to disobey orders by going 
after he had refused me. I walked out of camp 
and up the road. The wounded men were be- 
coming more and more numerous. I saw men, 
faint from loss of blood, sitting in the shade 
cast by trees. Other men were lying down. 
All were pale, and their faces expressed great 
suffering. As I walked I saw a dead man lying 
under a tree which stood by the roadside. He 
had been shot through the chest and had strug- 
gled to the rear ; then, becoming exhausted or 
choked with blood, he had lain down on a car- 
pet of leaves and died. His pockets were 
turned inside out. A little farther on I met 
a sentinel standing by the roadside. Other 
sentinels paced to and fro in the woods on 
each side of the road, or stood leaning against 



THE BATTLE OF THE WILDERNESS. 59 

trees, looking in the direction of the battle-Hne, 
which was far ahead of them in the woods. I 
stopped to talk to the guard posted on the 
road. He eyed me inquiringly, and answered 
my question as to what he was doing there, 
saying : '' Sending stragglers back to the 
front." Then he added, in an explanatory tone : 

** No enlisted man can go past me to the 
rear unless he can show blood." 

He turned to a private who was hastening 
down the road, and cried : 

"Halt!" 

The soldier, who was going to the rear, paid 
no attention to the command. Instantly the 
sentinel's rifle was cocked, and it rose to his 
shoulder. He coolly covered the soldier, and 
sternly demanded that he show blood. The 
man had none to show. The cowardly soldier 
was ordered to return to his regiment, and, 
greatly disappointed, he turned back. Wound- 
ed men passed the guard without being halted. 
These guards seemed to be posted in the rear 
of the battle-lines for the express purpose of 
intercepting the flight of cowards. At the 
time, it struck me as a quaint idea to picket the 
rear of an army which was fighting a desperate 
battle. 



6o RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVA TE, 

I explained to the sentinel that I was a light- 
artillery man, and that I wanted to see the 
fight. 

'' Can I go past you ? " I inquired. 

''Yes," he replied, "you can go up. But 
you had better not go," he added. '' You have 
no distinctive mark or badge on your dress 
to indicate the arm you belong to. If you 
go up, you may not be allowed to return, and 
then," he added, as he shrugged his shoulders 
indifferently, '* you may get killed. But suit 
yourself." 

So I went on. There was very heavy firing 
to the left of the road in a chaparral of brush 
and scrubby pines and oaks. There the 
musketry was a steady roar, and the cheers 
and yells of the fighters incessant. I left 
the road and walked through the woods 
toward the battle-ground, and met many 
wounded men who were coming out. They 
were bound for the rear and the hospitals. 
Then I came on a body of troops lying in re- 
serve, — a second line of battle, I suppose. I 
heard the hum of bullets as they passed over 
the low trees. Then I noticed that small 
limbs of trees were falling in a feeble shower 
in advance of me. It was as though an army 



THE BATTLE OF THE WILDERNESS. 



61 



of squirrels were at work cutting off nut and 
pine cone-laden branches preparatory to lay- 
ino- in their winter's store of food. Then, par- 
tially obscured by a cloud of powder smoke, 
I saw a straggling line of men clad ni blue. 
They were not standing as if on parade, but 
they were taking advantage of the cover af- 
forded by trees, and they were faring rapidly. 
Their line officers were standing behind them 
or in hne with them. The smoke drifted to 
and fro, and there were many rifts in it. I 
saw scores of wounded men. I saw many dead 
soldiers lying on the ground, and I saw men 
constantly falling on the battle-line. I could 
not see the Confederates, and, as I had gone 
to the front expressly to see a battle, I 
pushed on, picking my way from protective 
tree to protective tree, until I was about forty 
yards from the battle-line. The uproar was 
deafening; the bullets flew through the air 
thickly Now our line would move forward a 
few yards, now fall back. I stood behind a 
large oak tree, and peeped around its trunk 
I heard bullets '^ spat " into this tree, and I 
suddenly realized that I was in danger. My 
heart thumped wildly for a minute; then my 
throat and mouth felt dry and queer. A dead 



62 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE. 

sergeant lay at my feet, with a hole in his 
forehead just above his left eye. Out of this 
wound bits of brain oozed, and slid on a bloody 
trail into his eye, and thence over his cheek to 
the ground. I leaned over the body to feel 
of it. It was still warm. He could not have 
been dead for over five minutes. As I stooped 
over the dead man, bullets swept past me, and 
I became angry at the danger I had foolishly 
gotten into. I unbuckled the dead man's cart- 
ridge belt, and strapped it around me, and 
then I picked up his rifle. I remember stand- 
ing behind the large oak tree, and dropping 
the ramrod into the rifle to see if it was loaded. 
It was not. So I loaded it, and before I fairly 
understood what had taken place, I was in the 
rear rank of the battle-line, which had surged 
back on the crest of a battle billow, bareheaded, 
and greatly excited, and blazing away at an in- 
distinct, smoke-and-tree-obscured line of men 
clad in gray and slouch-hatted. As I cooled 
off in the heat of the battle fire, I found that 
I was on the Fifth Corps' line, instead of on 
the Second Corps' line, where I wanted to be. 
I spoke to the men on either side of me, and 
they stared at me, a stranger, and briefly said 
that the regiment, the distinctive number of 



THE BATTLE OF THE WILDERNESS. 63 

which I have long since forgotten, was near the 
left of the Fifth Corps, and that they had been 
fighting pretty steadily since about ten o'clock 
in the morning, but with poor success, as the 
Confederates had driven them back a little. 
The fire was rather hot, and the men were 
falling pretty fast. Still it was not anywhere 
near as bloody as I had expected a battle to 
be. As a grand, inspiring spectacle, it was 
highly unsatisfactory, owing to the powder 
smoke obscuring the vision. At times we 
could not see the Confederate line, but that 
made no difference ; we kept on firing just 
as though they were in full view. We gained 
ground at times, and then dead Confederates 
lay on the ground as thickly as dead Union 
soldiers did behind us. Then we would fall 
back, fighting stubbornly, but steadily giving 
ground, until the dead were all clad in blue. 

Between two and three o'clock the fire in 
our front slackened. We did not advance. 
Indeed I saw no general officer on the battle- 
line to take advantage of any opportunity that 
the battle's tide might expose to a man of mili- 
tary talent. I had seen some general officers 
near the reserves, but none on the front line. 
I noticed the lack of artillery and saw that the 



64 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE. 

nature of the ground forbade its use. Our 
line was fed with fresh troops and greatly 
strengthened. Boxes of cartridges were carried 
to us, and we helped ourselves. We were 
standing behind trees or lying on the ground, 
and occasionally shooting at the Confederate 
line, or where their line should have been. 
Some of the old soldiers muttered about things 
in general, and rebel dodges in particular, and 
darkly hinted that the sudden slackening of 
the fire in our front boded no good to us. 
Soon a storm of yells, followed instantly by a 
roar of musketry, rolled to us from the left, 
and not distant. Almost instantly it was fol- 
lowed by a cheer and a volley of musketry. 
We sprang to our feet and were in line, but 
there was nothing in strength ahead of us. 
To the left the noise increased in volume. 
The musketry was thunderous. Soon affrighted 
men rushed through the woods to our rear, not 
in ones and twos, but in dozens and scores, 
and as they swept past us they cried loudly : 

^' We are flanked ! Hill's corps has got 
around our left." 

Officers gave commands which I did not 
understand, but I did as my comrades did, and 
we were speedily placed at right angles to our 



THE BATTLE OF THE WILDERNESS. 65 

original position, which was held by a heavy 
skirmish line. Many of the men who were 
running from the battle-field dropped into our 
line and remained with us until nightfall. I 
saw men from a dozen different regiments 
standing in our line. We were dreadfully 
nervous, and felt around blindly for a few 
minutes, not knowing what to do. Then we 
were reassured by seeing a staff officer explain- 
ing something to the commander of the regi- 
ment, a young major. This officer passed the 
word along the line that the Second Corps had 
come up just in time to close up a gap between 
the two corps, through which the Confederate 
general. Hill, had endeavored to thrust a 
heavy column of infantry. Speedily we got 
back into our original position. In a few min- 
utes we saw a thin line of gray figures, not 
much heavier than a strong skirmish line, ad- 
vancing rapidly toward us. They yelled loudly 
and continuously. We began firing rapidly, 
and so did they. They came quite close to 
us, say within seventy-five yards, and covered 
themselves as well as they could. We could 
see them fairly well, and shot many of them, 
and they killed and wounded many Union sol- 
diers. Soon we drove them to cover, and they 



66 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVA TE. 

were comparatively quiet. The noise to the 
left, where Hancock's corps was fighting, al- 
most drowned the racket we were making. 
The Confederate charge against the portion of 
the Fifth Corps where I was fighting was not 
delivered with vim. It impressed me as a 
sham. Their line, as I said, was thin, and it 
lacked momentum. I spoke to my fellows' 
about it, and they all agreed that it was not 
earnest fighting, but a sham to cover the real 
attack on our left. There the battle raged 
with inconceivable fury for about two hours. 
Then the fight died down, and excepting for 
picket-firing, the lines were silent. 

The wounded soldiers lay scattered among 
the trees. They moaned piteously. The un- 
wounded troops, exhausted with battle, helped 
their stricken comrades to the rear. The 
wounded were haunted with the dread of fire. 
They conjured the scenes of the previous year, 
when some wounded men were burned to 
death, and their hearts well-nigh ceased to beat 
when they thought they detected the smell of 
burning wood in the air. The bare prospect 
of fire running through the woods where they 
lay helpless, unnerved the most courageous of 
men, and made them call aloud for help. I 



THE BATTLE OF THE WILDERNESS. 6/ 

saw many wounded soldiers in the Wilderness 
who hung on to their rifles, and whose inten- 
tion was clearly stamped on their pallid faces. 
I saw one man, both of whose legs were broken, 
lying on the ground with his cocked rifle by 
his side and his ramrod in his hand, and his 
eyes set on the front. I knew he meant to kill 
himself in case of fire — knew it as surely as 
though I could read his thoughts. The dead 
men lay where they fell. Their haversacks 
and cartridges had been taken from their 
bodies. The battle-field ghouls had rifled 
their pockets. I saw no dead man that night 
whose pockets had not been turned inside out. 
Soon after dark the story of the fight on our 
left had been gathered by the newsmongers, 
and we learned that the Second Corps had 
saved itself from rout and the army from de- 
feat by the most dogged fighting, and that 
they had required the aid of Getty's division 
of the Sixth Corps to enable them to hold 
their own. That news was sufficient to start 
me. So I went down the line, walking through 
the woods, stumbling over the dead and being 
cursed by the living, until I came to the Second 
Corps. There I found a regiment, the Fortieth 
New York, if I correctly recall the number, 



68 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE. 

some of whose soldiers I knew. They told me 
the story of the fight. It was really told by 
the windrows of dead men, and the loud and 
continuous shrieks and groans of the wounded. 
I was still bareheaded, and I fitted myself with 
a hat from a collection of hats lying near some 
dead men. And I took a pair of blankets from 
the shoulders of a dead man and slept in them 
that night. 

Early the next morning, long before sunrise, 
I had my breakfast, and having seen sufficient 
of the fighting done by infantry, and strongly 
impressed with the truth that a light-artillery 
man had better stay close to his guns, I bade 
my acquaintances good-by, and walked off, in- 
tent on getting to my gun and comparative 
comfort and safety. But I hung on to my rifle 
and belt. They were to be trophies of the 
battle, and I meant to excite the envy of my 
comrades by displaying them. Stepping into 
the road I walked along briskly, and saw many 
other unwounded men rearward bound. A 
sentinel, with rifle at the carry, halted me, and 
demanded to see blood. I could show none. 
I assured him that I belonged to the light artil- 
lery, and that I had gone to the front the pre- 
vious day just to see the battle. 



THE BATTLE OF THE WILDERNESS. 6g 

He said : *' You have a rifle ; you have a belt 
and a cartridge box. Your mouth is powder- 
blackened. You have been fighting as an in- 
fantryman, and you shall so continue to fight. 
You go back, or I will arrest you, and then you 
will be sent back." 

To say that I was amazed and disgusted 
would but faintly express my feelings. There 
stood the provost guard, who would not let me 
go home to my battery. I longed to kill him 
— longed to show the Army of the Potomac 
one dead provost guard ; but I was afraid to 
shoot him, for fear that his comrades might see 
me do it. So I turned and hastened back to 
the front. I determined to fight that day, and 
go home to the battery the succeeding night. 
I did not believe that the line of guards ex- 
tended far into the woods, and even if they 
did I knew that I could pass through the lines 
in the night. Before I rejoined the infantry 
who were on the battle-line I equipped myself 
with a plug of tobacco and two canteens filled 
with water — never mind where I got them. 

Away off to the right, toward the Rapidan, 
the battle rose with the sun. In our front, the 
Second Corps, there was little movement dis- 
cernible. But so dense was the cover that we 



70 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE. 

could see but little at a distance of two hundred 
yards. I saw that the soldiers had thrown up 
a slight intrenchment during the previous night. 
About five o'clock we were ordered to advance, 
and pushed ahead, fighting as we went, and 
forced Hill's men back, killing many, wounding 
more, and taking scores of prisoners. We 
crossed a road, which a wounded Confederate 
told me was the Brock road. I saw many dead 
Confederates during this advance. They were 
poorly clad. Their blankets were in rolls, hang- 
ing diagonally from the left shoulder to the 
right side, where the ends were tied with a 
string or a strap. Their canvas haversacks 
contained plenty of corn-meal and some bacon. 
I saw no coffee, no sugar, no hard bread in any 
of the Confederate haversacks I looked into. 
But there was tobacco in plugs on almost all 
the dead Confederates. Their arms were not 
as good as ours. They were poorly shod. The 
direful poverty of the Confederacy was plainly 
indicated by its dead soldiers. But they fought ? 
Yes, like men of purely American blood. We 
had charged, and charged, and charged again, 
and had gone wild with battle fever. We had 
gained about two miles of ground. We were 
doing splendidly. I cast my eyes upward to 



THE BATTLE OF THE WILDERNESS, 7 1 

see the sun, so as to judge of the time, as I was 
hungry and wanted to eat, and I saw that it 
was still low above the trees. The Confeder- 
ates seemed to be fighting more stubbornly, 
fighting as though their battle-line was being 
fed with more troops. They hung on to the 
ground they occupied tenaciously, and reso- 
lutely refused to fall back further. Then came 
a swish of bullets and a fierce exultant yell, as 
of thousands of infuriated tigers. Our men 
fell by scores. Great gaps were struck in our 
lines. There was a lull for an instant, and then 
Longstreet's men sprang to the charge. It was 
swiftly and bravely made, and was within an 
ace of being successful. There was great con- 
fusion in our line. The men wavered badly. 
They fired wildly. They hesitated. I feared 
the line would break ; feared that we were 
whipped. The line was fed with troops from 
the reserve. The regimental ofificers held their 
men as well as they could. We could hear 
them close behind us, or in line with us, say- 
ing : '^ Steady, men, steady, steady, steady ! " as 
one speaks to frightened and excited horses. 
The Confederate fire resembled the fury of hell 
in intensity, and was deadly accurate. Their 
bullets swished by in swarms. It seems to me 



72 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVA TE. 

that I could have caught a pot full of them if 
I had had a strong iron vessel rigged on a pole 
as a butterfly net. Again our line became 
wavy and badly confused, and it was rapidly 
being shot into a skirmish-like order of forma- 
tion. Speedily a portion of the Ninth Corps 
came to our assistance, and they came none too 
soon. They steadied the line and we regained 
heart. During this critical time, when the fate 
of the Second Corps was trembling in the bal- 
ance, many officers rushed to and fro behind us, 
but I saw no major-generals among them ; but 
then I had sufficient to do to look ahead and 
fall back without falling down, and they may 
have been on the battle-line, only I did not see 
them. The Confederates got a couple of bat- 
teries into action, and they added to the deaf- 
ening din. The shot and shell from these guns 
cut great limbs off of the trees, and these 
occasionally fell near the battle-line, and sev- 
eral men were knocked down by them. Our 
line strengthened, we, in our turn, pushed 
ahead, and Longstreet's men gave ground 
slowly before us, fighting savagely for every 
foot. The wounded lay together. I saw, in 
the heat of this fight, wounded men of the 
opposing forces aiding each other to reach the 



THE BATTLE OF THE WILDERNESS. 73 

protective shelter of trees and logs, and, as we 
advanced, I saw a Confederate and a Union 
soldier drinking in turn out of a Union can- 
teen, as they lay behind a tree. 

There was another lull, and then the charging 
line of gray again rushed to the assault with 
inconceivable fury. We fired and fired and 
fired, and fell back fighting stubbornly. We 
tore cartridges until our teeth ached. But we 
could not check the Confederate advance, and 
they forced us back and back and back until 
we were behind the slight intrenchments along 
the Brock road. A better charge, or a more 
determined, I never saw. We fought savagely 
at the earthworks. At some points the timber 
used in the earthworks was fired, and our men 
had to stand back out of the line of flame and 
shoot through it at the Confederates, who were 
fighting in front of the works. And the 
woods, through which we had fallen back, 
were set on fire, and many wounded soldiers 
were burned to death. We beat off the Con- 
federates, and they, with the exception of the 
picket line, disappeared. Our line was straight- 
ened, reserves were brought up, and some of the 
battle-torn troops were relieved. We had half 
an hour's rest, during which time many of us 



74 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE. 

ate and smoked, and drank out of our canteens ; 
and we talked, though not so hopefully as in the 
early morning. Men missed old comrades, and 
with only seeming indifference figuratively 
reckoned they had '' turned up their toes." 
Firing had almost ceased. It was as the ces- 
sation of the wind before the approach of a 
cyclone. A tempest of fire and balls and yells 
broke out on the right. We were out of it. 
The real battle raged furiously in the woods to 
the right, while a heavy line of Confederate 
skirmishers, who lurked skilfully behind trees 
and who fired briskly and accurately, made 
things decidedly unpleasant for us, and effectu- 
ally prevented any men being drawn from our 
portion of the line to strengthen the right. 
How we fretted while this unseen combat 
raged ! We judged that our men were being 
worsted as the battle-sounds passed steadily to 
our rear. Then the fugitives, the men quick 
to take alarm and speedy of foot when faced 
to the rear, began to pass diagonally through 
the woods behind us. While we stood quiver- 
ing with nervous excitement, and gazing anx- 
iously into each other's eyes, we heard a solid 
roll of musketry, as though a division had fired 
together, cheers followed, and then the battle- 



THE BATTLE OF THE WILDERNESS. 75 

sound rapidly advanced toward the Confederate 
line. Then all was quiet, and the fighting on the 
left of our line was over. Soon word was passed 
along the line that the charging Confederates 
had broken through the left of the Ninth Corps, 
and would have cut the army in twain if Gene- 
ral Carroll had not caught them on the flank 
and driven them back with the Third Brigade 
of the Second Division of the Second Corps. 

The enlisted men supposed the day's fighting 
was over. And so did our generals. But the 
Confederates marched swiftly on many parallel 
roads, and were massed for an attack on our 
right, the Sixth Corps. They were skilfully 
launched and ably led, and they struck with 
terrific violence against Shaler's and Seymour's 
brigades, which were routed, with a loss of 
4,000 prisoners. The Confederates came within 
an ace of routing the Sixth Corps ; but the 
commanders restored and steadied the lines, 
and the Confederate charge was first checked 
and then bloodily repulsed. 

The day's offensive fighting on the part of 
the Confederates, as we, the enlisted men, 
summed it up, had consisted of two general 
assaults delivered all along our line, as though 
to feel of us and discover where we were the 



J 6 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVA TE. 

weakest, and to promptly take advantage of 
the knowledge gained, to attack in force and 
with surprising vim and stanchness first one 
flank and then the other. Both of the assaults 
were dangerously near being successful. 

The sun sank, and the gloom among the 
trees thickened and thickened until darkness 
reigned in the forest where thousands of dead 
and wounded men lay. The air still smelled 
of powder-smoke. Many soldiers cleaned out 
their rifles. We ate, and then large details 
helped to carry their wounded comrades to the 
road, where we loaded them into ambulances 
and wagons. I determined to join my battery. 
I threw aWay my rifle and belt, and as the first 
wagons loaded with wounded men moved to 
the rear, I walked by the side of the column 
and passed the guards, if there were any sta- 
tioned on that road, without being challenged. 
When I was well to the rear, I for the first and 
last time became a '^ coffee boiler." I cooked 
and ate a hearty supper, and then rolled myself 
in the dead soldier's blankets, which I had 
hung on to, and slept soundly until morning, 
when I found the battery I belonged to with- 
out much trouble, and was promptly punished 
for being absent without leave. 



THE BATTLE OF THE WILDERNESS. jy 

About ten o'clock in the morning I was sit- 
ting by the battery wagon, sullenly nursing my 
sore arms and shoulders and my wrath. I had 
had an experience of packing a stick of wood 
on my shoulder in front of a guard, who skil- 
fully touched me up with the point of his 
sabre when I lagged, that had soured my 
usually sweet temper. And I was ill-tempered 
when wounded men began to drift through the 
guns. The noise in the woods had sunk to 
skirmish-firing. The wounded men said that 
the third day's fighting opened with a lit- 
tle artillery practice at nothing, which was not 
answered, and that then the men who carried 
rifles investigated matters, and promptly 
discovered that the Confederates had in- 
trenched themselves during the night. 

That evening the troops began to pour out 
of the woods in columns. The infantry sol- 
diers marched soberly past the artillery. There 
were no exultant songs in those columns. 
The men seemed aged. They were very tired 
and very hungry. They seemed to be greatly 
depressed. I sat by the roadside, in front of 
the battery, waiting for it to move, and atten- 
tively watched the infantry march past. Many 
of the soldiers spoke to me, asking if there was 



yS RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE. 

authentic news as to where they were going. 
Some of these men were slightly wounded. I 
noticed that the wounded men who stuck to 
their colors were either Irish or Americans, 
and that they had the stride and bearing of 
veterans. There was a gap in the column, and 
my battery moved on to the road, and other 
batteries followed us. We marched rapidly 
and without halting, until we reached a point 
where another road, which led in the direction 
of the right of our battle-line, joined the road 
we were on. Here we met a heavy column of 
troops marching to the rear, as we were. The 
enlisted men were grave, and rather low in 
spirits, and decidedly rough in temper. March- 
ing by my side was a Vermont Yankee ser- 
geant whose right cheek had been slightly 
burnt by a rifle-ball, not enough to send him 
to the rear, but sufficient to make him irritable 
and ill-tempered. He talked bitterly of the 
fight. His men talked worse. They one and 
all asserted that the army was not whipped, 
that they had not been properly handled in 
the two first days' fighting, and that the two 
days' fighting had resulted in a Confederate loss 
almost, if not quite, equal to ours, as the fight- 
ing was generally outside of the earthworks. 



THE BATTLE OF THE WILDERNESS. 79 

" Here we go," said a Yankee private ; 
" here we go, marching for the Rapidan, and 
the protection afforded by that river. Now, 
when we get to the Chancellorsville House, if 
we turn to the left, we are whipped — at least 
so say Grant and Meade. And if we turn 
toward the river, the bounty-jumpers will 
break and run, and there will be a panic." 

'' Suppose we turn to the right, what then ? " 
I asked. 

'' That will mean fighting, and fighting on 
the line the Confederates have selected and in- 
trenched. But it will indicate the purpose of 
Grant to fight," he replied. 

Then he told me that the news in his Sixth 
Corps brigade was that Meade had strongly 
advised Grant to turn back and recross the 
Rapidan, and that this advice was inspired by 
the loss of Shaler's and Seymour's brigades on 
the evening of the previous day. This was the 
first time I heard this rumor, but I heard it 
fifty times before I slept that night. The en- 
listed men, one and all, believed it, and I then 
believed the rumor to be authentic, and I be- 
lieve it to-day. None of the enlisted men had 
any confidence in Meade as a tenacious, ag- 
gressive fighter. They had seen him allow the 



80 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE, 

Confederates to escape destruction after Get- 
tysburg, and many of them openly ridiculed 
him and his alleged military ability. 

Grant's military standing with the enlisted 
men this day hung on the direction we turned 
at the Chancellorsville House. If to the left, 
he was to be rated with Meade and Hooker 
and Burnside and Pope — the generals who pre- 
ceded him. At the Chancellorsville House we 
turned to the right. Instantly all of us heard 
a sigh of relief. Our spirits rose. We marched 
free. The men began to sing. The enlisted 
men understood the flanking movement. That 
night we were happy. There was much inter- 
change of opinion between the artillerymen 
and the infantry. We gathered from the losses 
these men enumerated in their own commands 
that the three days' fighting had cost Grant 
about twenty-five thousand men, or a little 
more than one fifth of the army. And the en- 
listed men — the volunteers who had brains in 
their skulls — always insisted that those figures 
correctly represented the losses of Union sol- 
diers in the bloody Wilderness battle. 



V. 

FIGHTING AROUND SPOTTSYLVANIA. 

MAY 8, 1864. The bloody battle of the 
Wilderness was a thing of the past. 
That dense chaparral in which the unburied 
dead Union and Confederate soldiers lay scat- 
tered thickly was being left behind us as' we 
marched. In the morning the guns of the 
Fifth Corps notified the Union troops that the 
Confederates had been found. The Fifth 
Corps had been in the advance in the flank 
movement to the left out of the Wilderness, 
and Longstreet's corps had marched parallel 
with it, and had taken position behind the 
river Ny, which was more properly a creek. 
We were not in this fight, but correctly judged 
that it was not severe, as at no time did the 
battle's roar rise to the volume which indicates 
a fierce engagement. On May 9th the army 
was clear of the Wilderness. We took position 
around Spottsylvania Court-House. Wherever 
we went there were heavy earthworks, behind 



82 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVA TE. 

which the veteran Confederate infantry lurked. 
The day was spent in getting into position and 
in bloody wrangling between the opposing 
pickets and in sharpshooting. At intervals 
would be a crash of musketry and a cheer; 
then the artillery would open and fire briskly 
for a few minutes. But there was no real 
fighting. That night we heard that General 
Sedgwick, commanding the Sixth Corps, had 
been killed by a sharpshooter or by a stray ball 
from the Confederate picket line. 

May loth, and the fighting began. The din 
of the battle was continuous, and as much of 
the artillery had been drawn to the battle-line 
the noise was far louder than it had been in 
the Wilderness. The troops fought all day. 
A solid roll of musketry, mingled with the 
thunderous reports of cannon quickly served, 
caused the air to quiver. After fighting all 
day, we spent a large portion of the night in 
fruitless endeavors to flank the Confederate 
position. Spent it in following staff officers, 
to find that we were again in front of earth- 
works, which were lined with keen-eyed, reso- 
lute infantry soldiers. In Spottsylvania we 
fought by day, we marched by night, and our 
losses were exceedingly large. 



FIGHTING AROUND SPOTTSYLVANIA. 83 

One day the battery I served with was parked 
for rest near a road down which wounded men 
were streaming in a straggling column. These 
men, tired, weakened by loss of blood, and dis- 
couraged, tumbled exhausted into the angles 
of worm fences, and spread their blankets from 
rail to rail to make a shade. There they rested 
and patiently waited for their turn at the sur- 
geons' tables. They were a ghastly array. The 
sight of these poor, stricken men as they helped 
one another, as they bound one another's 
wounds, as they painfully hobbled to and fro 
for water, was a most pathetic one. They 
lined the roadside for half a mile, a double 
hedgerow of suffering and death, as men were 
dying in the fence corners every few minutes. 
Down the road we heard the stirring music of 
a martial band. Soon the head of a column of 
troops came in sight. Officers were riding at 
the head of the soldiers on horses that pranced. 
The men were neatly clad, and their brass 
shoulder-plates shone brightly in the sun. 

^' The heavy-artillery men from the fortifica- 
tions around Washington," one of my comrades 
murmured. 

These fresh soldiers were marching beauti- 
fully. They were singing loudly and tunefully. 



84 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVA TE. 

They were apparently pleased with the prospect 
of fighting in defence of their country. For some 
reason the infantry of the line — the volunteer 
infantry — did not admire heavy-artillery men. 
They liked light-artillery men, and were en- 
couraged by the presence of the guns on the 
battle-line. There was something inspiring in 
the work of the gunners and in the noisy re- 
ports of the cannon ; and, then, cannon were 
deadly, and if well served and accurately aimed, 
they could and did pulverize charging columns. 
But heavy-artillery men were soldiers of a dif- 
ferent breed. There was a widespread belief 
among us that these men had enlisted in that 
arm because they expected to fight behind 
earthworks, or to safely garrison the forts 
which surrounded Washington. We did not 
like these troops. The head of the heavy-ar- 
tillery column, the men armed as infantry, was 
thrust among the wounded who lined the road- 
side. These bloody wrecks of soldiers derided 
the new-comers. Men would tauntingly point 
to a shattered arm, or a wounded leg, or to 
bloody wounds on their faces, or to dead men 
lying in fence corners, and derisively shout : 
" That is what you will catch up yonder in the 
woods ! " and they would solemnly indicate the 



FIGHTING AROUND SPOTTSYLVANIA. 85 

portion of the forest they meant by extending 
arms from which blood trickled in drops. I 
saw one group of these wounded men repeat- 
edly cover and uncover with a blanket a dead 
man whose face was horribly distorted, and 
show the courage-sapping spectacle to the 
marching troops, and faintly chuckle and cause 
their pale cheeks to bulge with derisive tongue- 
thrusts, as they saw the heavy-artillery men's 
faces blanch. Still others would inquire in 
mock solicitious tones as to the locality of 
their cannon, and then tenderly inquire of 
some soldier whose bearing or dress caught 
their attention ; " Why, dearest, why did you 
leave your earthwork behind you ? " And they 
would hobble along and solemnly assure the man 
that he had made a serious mistake, and that 
he should have brought the earthwork along, 
as he would need it in yonder woods, pointing 
with outstretched bloody arms to the forest, 
where the battle's roar resounded. Others as- 
sumed attitudes of mock admiration and gazed 
impudently and contemptuously at the full regi- 
ments as they marched by. Long before the 
heavy-artillery men had passed through the 
bloody gauntlet their songs were hushed. 
They became grave and sober-minded. For 



86 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVA TE. 

the first time they realized what war meant. It 
was not play. It was not pleasure. It was not 
sport under the greenwood trees, but a savage 
encounter with desperate adversaries, who 
dealt death and grievous wounds with impar- 
tial hands. These troops passed us and en- 
tered the woods and the battle, and I am proud 
to say that their fighting was superb. They 
fought with a steadiness and determination 
that could not be excelled. The whole army 
honored them. After Spottsylvania I never 
heard a word spoken against the heavy-artillery 
men whom Grant summoned from Washington 
to make good his losses in the Wilderness. 

The movable fight dragged along until May 
1 2th. We fought here. We charged there. 
We accomplished nothing. But early on the 
morning of May I2th the Second Corps carried 
by assault the Confederate works held by John- 
ston's division of Ewell's corps, capturing about 
three thousand five hundred prisoners and thirty 
guns. Our troops caught the battle-exhausted 
Confederates asleep in their blankets. The 
Confederate line was broken. Their army was 
cut in twain. But it amounted to nothing. If 
the advantage had been intelligently followed 
up, it might have had decisive results. As it 



FIGHTING AROUND SPOTTSYLVANIA. 8/ 

was, many thousands of enlisted men were 
killed and wounded in a furious fight which 
lasted all day, and the next morning we found 
that the Confederates had fortified a line in 
rear of the captured works, and our losses of 
thousands of brave men resulted in nothing 
but the capture of twenty guns (ten of these 
guns which were captured by the Second Corps 
were wrested from them by Ewell's men in the 
fights that ensued). 

That night a wounded Second Corps soldier 
came into our battery, and joined me at the 
fire. He asked for food. I had plenty, and as 
the man's right arm was stiff from a wound, I 
told him I would cook a supper for him if he 
would wait. He greedily accepted the invita- 
tion. Soon I had a mess of pork and hardtack 
frying and coffee boiling, and as I had that day 
found a haversack — truth is that its owner, a 
heavy-artillery man, was asleep when I found it 
— which contained a can of condensed milk and 
half a loaf of light bread, the wounded soldier 
and I had a feast. After supper we smoked 
and talked. He told, in vivid, descriptive lan- 
guage, of the day's fighting, of the capture of 
the guns, and of the strength of the Confeder- 
ate intrenchments. Soberly he said* 



88 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVA TE, 

** The Army of the Potomac has always 
longed for a fighting general — one who would 
fight, and fight, and fight, — and now it has got 
him. But," he added, '' he does not seem to 
know that Lee's veteran infantry cannot be 
driven out of skilfully constructed earthworks 
by direct assault. I am afraid he will waste 
the army by dashing it against works that 
cannot be captured. The enlisted men have 
been sacrificed to-day," he added sadly, " and 
unlike the results in the Wilderness fight, we 
have killed but few Confederates, except at 
the captured forts." 

This was the first complaint I heard against 
Grant. I heard plenty before the campaign 
closed. 

"■ The Wilderness," said my wounded guest, 
*' was a private's battle. The men fought as 
best they could, and fought stanchly. The 
generals could not see the ground, and if they 
were on the front line, they could not have 
seen their troops. The enlisted men did not 
expect much generalship to be shown. All 
they expected was to have the battle-torn por- 
tions of the line fed with fresh troops. There 
was no chance for a display of military talent 
on our side, only for the enlisted men to fight, 



FIGHTING AROUND SPOTTSYLVANIA, 89 

and fight, and fight ; and that they did cheer- 
fully and bravely. Here the Confederates are 
strongly intrenched, and it was the duty of 
our generals to know the strength of the 
works (we all knew the dogged fighting ca- 
pacity of their defenders) before they launched 
the army against them." The intelligent 
private's criticism of the military capacity of 
our generals struck me as eminently correct, 
and made me thoughtful. My guest was 
tired, and first exacting a promise from me 
that I would give him his breakfast, he lay on 
his back behind a tree, and after I had bathed 
his wounded arm he slept. 

We marched to and fro. The infantry were 
almost constantly engaged in feeling of the 
Confederate lines to find a weak place, and 
finding all points stanchly defended. The 
artillery was pleasantly employed in burying 
good iron in Confederate earthworks. The 
list of our killed and wounded and missing 
grew steadily and rapidly, longer and longer, 
as their cartridge-boxes grew lighter and light- 
er. One day a brisk fight was going on in 
front of us. We were ordered to the top of 
a hill and told to fire over our infantry into the 
edge of the woods, where the Confederates lay. 



QO RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVA TE. 

The battery swung into action. Below us, in 
the open, was a pasture field. In it were two 
batteries and a line of infantry. The former 
were noisily engaged ; the latter were not do- 
ing much of any thing. The Confederates 
were behind an earthwork that stood, shad- 
owed by trees, in the edge of the forest, and It 
was evident that they meant to stay there. 
Our infantry charged, and at some points 
they entered the edge of the woods, out of 
which they speedily came, followed by a dis- 
orderly and heavy line of Confederate skirm- 
ishers. The batteries In the open were skil- 
fully handled and admirably served, but it was 
a matter of a very short time for them. As 
soon as our infantry got out of range In a 
ravine, the Confederate skirmishers dropped 
prone on the ground, disappeared behind trees, 
sank into holes, squatted behind bushes, and 
turned their attention to the Union batteries, 
which were within rifle range of the skirmishers, 
and the guns were almost Instantly driven from 
the field, leaving many horses, and men clad 
in blue, lying on the ground. Then the Con- 
federate skirmishers ran back to their earth- 
works and clambered over. The battery 
I served v*dth was firing three-Inch percussion 



FIGHTING AROUND SPOTTSYLVANIA. 9I 

bolts at the Confederate line and doing no 
harm. One of my comrades spoke to me 
across the gun, saying : " Grant and Meade 
are over there," nodding his head to Indicate 
the direction in which I was to look. I turned 
my head and saw Grant and Meade sitting on 
the ground under a large tree. Both of them 
were watching the fight which was going on in 
the pasture field. Occasionally they turned 
their glasses to the distant wood, above which 
small clouds of white smoke marked the burst- 
ing shells and the extent of the battle. Across 
the woods that lay behind the pasture, and be- 
hind the bare ridge that formed the horizon, 
and well within the Confederate lines, a dense 
column of dust arose, its head slowly moving 
to our left. I saw Meade call Grant's attention 
to this dust column, which w^as raised either 
by a column of Confederate infantry or by a 
wagon train. We ceased firing, and sat on the 
ground around the guns watching our general, 
and the preparations that were being made for 
another charge. Grant had a cigar in his 
mouth. His face was immovable and expres- 
sionless. His eyes lacked lustre. He sat 
quietly and watched the scene as though he 
was an uninterested spectator. Meade was 



92 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE. 

nervous, and his hand constantly sought his 
face, which it stroked. Staff officers rode 
furiously up and down the hill carrying orders 
and information. The infantry below us in 
the ravine formed for another charge. Then 
they started on the run for the Confederate 
earthworks, cheering loudly the while. We 
sprang to our guns and began firing rapidly 
over their heads at the edge of the woods. It 
was a fine display of accurate artillery practice, 
but, as the Confederates lay behind thick earth- 
works, and were veterans not to be shaken by 
shellino; the outside of a dirt bank behind 
which they lay secure, the fire resulted in 
emptying our limber chests, and in the remark- 
able discovery that three-inch percussion shells 
could not be relied upon to perform the work 
of a steam shovel. Our infantry advanced 
swiftly, but not with the vim they had dis- 
played a week previous ; and when they got 
within close rifle range of the works, they were 
struck by a storm of rifle-balls and canister that 
smashed the front line to flinders. They broke 
for cover, leaving the ground thickly strewed 
with dead and dying men. The second line of 
battle did not attempt to make an assault, but 
returned to the ravine. Grant's face never 



FIGHTING AROUND SPOTTSYLVANIA, 93 

changed its expression. He sat impassive and 
smolTed steadily, and watched the short-lived 
battle and decided defeat without displayuig 
emotion. Meade betrayed great anxiety. The 
fight over, the generals arose and walked back 
to their horses, mounted and rode briskly away, 
followed by their staff. No troops cheered 
them. None evinced the slightest enthusiasm. 
The enlisted men looked curiously at Grant, 
and after he had disappeared they talked of 
him, and of the dead and wounded men who 
lay in the pasture field ; and all of them said 
just what they thought, as was the wont of 
American volunteers. This was the only time 
that I saw either Grant or Meade under fire 
during the campaign, and then they were with- 
in range of rifled cannon only. 

Toward evening of the eighth day's fighting 
a furious attack was made on our right by 
Ewell's corps. This attack was repulsed, and 
then the battle died down to picket-firing and 
sharpshooting. Now and then a battery would 
fire a few shot into a Confederate earthwork, 
just to let its defenders know that we still lived. 
We were strongly intrenched, and it was evi- 
dent to the enlisted men that the battles fought 
around Spottsylvania belonged to the past. 



94 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVA TE. 

We estimated our losses up to this time at 
from forty-five thousand to fifty thousand men, 
or about two fifths of the men whom Grant 
took across the Rapidan. I slept from 6 P.M. 
of the eighth day's fighting until 2 P.M. of the 
ninth day's fighting. I made up the losses of 
sleep incurred during the eight days and nights 
of almost continuous fighting and marching. 
This sleep was so profound that I barely 
heard the guns as they occasionally roared 
over my head. I was easy in my mind, as I 
knew that some hollow-eyed comrade would 
awaken me if I was needed at the guns or if we 
moved. . 

I breakfasted about 3 P.M., and then, feeling 
frisky, volunteered to go to a spring a quarter 
of a mile to the rear, the first portion of the 
path to which was commanded by Confederate 
rifles. The crew of the gun I belonged to 
loaded me down with their empty canteens, 
and I ran, to avoid the sharpshooter's fire, 
to the protection of the forest behind us. 
There I saw many soldiers. Hollow-eyed, 
tired-looking men they were, too, but not 
" coffee-boilers," lying on the ground sleeping 
soundly. They had sought the comparative 
safety of the forest to sleep. Near the spring, 



FIGHTING AROUND SPOTTSYLVANIA. 95 

which rose in a dense thicket through which a 
spring run flowed, the shade was thick and the 
forest gloomy. The water in the spring had 
been roiled, so I searched for another higher 
up the run. While searching for it I saw a 
colonel of infantry put on his war paint. It 
was a howling farce in one act— one brief act 
of not more than twenty seconds' duration, but 
the fun of the world was crowded into it. 
This blond, bewhiskered brave sat safely be- 
hind a large oak tree. He looked around 
quickly. His face hardened with resolution. 
He took a cartridge out of his vest pocket, tore 
the paper with his strong white teeth, spilled 
the powder into his right palm, spat on it, and 
then, first casting a quick glance around to see 
if he was observed, he rubbed the moistened 
powder on his face and hands, and then dust- 
coated the war paint. Instantly he was trans- 
formed from a trembling coward who lurked 
behind a tree into an exhausted brave taking 
a little well-earned repose. I laughed silently 
at the spectacle, and filled my canteens at a 
spring I found, and then rejoined my com- 
rades, and together we laughed at and then 
drank to the health of the blonde warrior. 
That night I slept and dreamed of comic plays 



96 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE, 

and extravagant burlesques ; but in the wildest 
of dream vagaries there was no picture that at 
all compared with the actual one I had seen in 
the forest. That colonel is yet alive. I saw 
him two years ago. 



VI. 



THE FLANK MOVEMENT FROM SPOTTSYLVANIA 
TO THE NORTH ANNA RIVER. 

FOR fifteen days we had been fighting in 
the Wilderness and at Spottsylvania, 
and it was with great joy that the enHsted men 
of the Second Corps received on the afternoon 
of May 20, 1864, the order to withdraw from 
our foul intrenchments and march to the rear. 
Other troops occupied our earthworks as we 
marched out. Our officers assured us that we 
were to have a rest. We needed it. Fifteen 
days of battle— fifteen days of continuous and 
bloody fighting— had exhausted us physically, 
and had unstrung our nerves. We fell back 
to a piece of woods, and prepared to enjoy 
a night's unbroken sleep. The guns were 
parked. The picket rope was stretched, and 
some horses were tied to it, when a head- 
quarter's orderly rode briskly into our camp 
and delivered an order to our captain. The 

97 



98 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE. 

enlisted men ceased their preparations for 
making a night of it, and watched the orderly. 
The captain read the order, receipted for it and 
then ordered the chests of the gun limbers to 
be filled with ammunition, and supplemented 
that with another, commanding the chief of 
caissons to take them to the rear to the am- 
munition train and fill them. The enlisted 
men did not relish these orders. They sharply 
indicated that we were not to have a long, un- 
broken sleep. In a few minutes the battery 
quartermaster came into camp, accompanied 
by his wagons, which were loaded with forage 
and rations. The line sergeants loudly called : 
''Fall in for rations!" and the gun detach- 
ments marched to the wagons, where six days' 
rations were issued to us. Sacks of grain were 
thrown on the ground, preparatory to being 
loaded on the limbers and caissons. To the 
right, to the left of us, heavy six-mule teams 
rolled into the infantry camps, and the soldiers 
gathered around them with open haversacks, 
which were speedily filled. Men who were 
bathing at a run which flowed near us, or who 
were seated shirt in hand on the ground, en- 
deavoring to pick the vermin off of that gar- 
ment, put on their clothing and hurried to the 



THE FLANK MOVEMENT. 99 

wagons. Then other wagons, which chucked 
heavily into ruts, rolled into the infantry 
camps, and chests filled with ammunition were 
thrown out and ripped open, and the soldiers 
helped themselves. Cartridge-boxes were filled 
until they sagged heavily on the supporting 
belts. 

After eating an early supper I walked over 
to the nearest infantry regiment, and found 
most of the men lying on the ground, sleeping 
soundly by their stacked muskets. A few 
groups of earnest, intelligent soldiers sat under 
trees studying the war maps of Virginia which 
were open before them. These men told me 
that six days' rations— and generous rations, 
too— had been issued to them, and that every 
enlisted man had forty rounds of ammunition 
in his cartridge-box and twenty in his pockets. 
I sat with these men for an hour. We talked 
of the campaign, and studied the maps, and 
finally concluded that the Second Corps was to 
march that night to our left, and attempt to 
get around the Confederate, right. Not a man 
of the group I was with believed that the move- 
ment would be successful. We knew, and the 
maps showed, that the Confederates had the 
shortest line to march on, and we had heard 



100 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE, 

from cavalry privates who had ridden south on 
raids or who had operated on the flanks of the 
army, that the important strategic points and 
natural lines of defence that lay in the region 
intervening between us and Richmond had all 
been carefully fortified. But whether the 
movement would be successful or not, it was 
the only thing to be done, unless it were to re- 
turn to the camps north of the Rapidan. Every 
intelligent enlisted man in the Army of the 
Potomac knew that we could not wrest the Con- 
federate intrenchments at Spottsylvania from 
Lee's veteran infantry. 

Returning to the battery, I found many of 
the cannoneers studying war maps, with which 
we light-artillery men had abundantly supplied 
ourselves, and earnestly endeavoring to fathom 
Grant's plans. I had indulged in this military 
pastime with the infantry soldiers, and, when 
my comrades asked me to join them, I declined 
to waste further time in the sport, and spread 
my blankets under a tree on the vermin-in- 
fested ground, and was asleep instantly, to be 
awakened just as I was winning a great battle, 
by the drivers hitching in their horses. I 
packed up, asked a sergeant what time it was, 
and was told that it was about midnight. There 



THE FLANK MOVEMENT, lOI 

were no bugle calls that night Indeed, I heard 
no music, not even the tap of a drum. Silently 
the battery rolled off of our camp ground. We 
could hear the solid tread, tread, tread of un- 
seen infantry as they marched by. All around 
us the air hummed and vibrated with life. 
Murmurs as of reeds whisperingly greeting the 
flowing sea filled the air. We came to a broad 
road which showed white in the night, and 
along which the Second Corps were streaming 
at a winging gait, with their arms at will. We 
turned into the road and marched alongside of 
these men. How they growled ! How they 
swore ! We, too, growled and marched, and 
growled and swore, and grumbled and enjoyed 
life right savagely. About two o'clock in the 
morning we heard a noise in the forest to our 
right, and then a couple of rifle shots rang out 
sharply. Instantly the column halted. The 
infantry faced to the right, and crowded close 
to the cannon. A score of men sprang over the 
guns, and dashed through the forest in the 
direction of the sound we had heard. The 
rifles of the soldiers crowding us were raised to 

their shoulders. 

- Lie down ! lie down ! " they whispered to us. 
We unlimbered the guns, but had not suf^- 



I02 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE, 

dent space to swing them into battery, so 
closely did the infantry press around us. 

*' Lie down ! Get out of our line of fire ! 
Lie down ! " whispered a soldier, whose eyes 
blazed with excitement, to me and to my com- 
rades. 

We crouched low around the gun-trails, and 
waited. After the column halted I did not hear 
an officer give a command. The enlisted men 
knew what to do, and did it instantly and with- 
out orders. It was an impressive sight that I 
saw above me : two lines of veteran infantry, 
with rifles almost aimed, with set faces and 
blazing eyes, gazing intently into the darkness 
of a dense forest in search of an unseen enemy 
whom we thought was lurking there. So pro- 
found was the silence that I could hear 'my 
heart beat. Soon we heard the voices of the 
skirmishers, who had rushed into the woods, 
calling lowly, but distinctly, as they returned : 

'' There is nothing there. Don't fire ! don't 
fire ! We are coming back." They rejoined the 
battle-line, which faced into column, and, lim- 
bering up, we resumed the march. But I did 
not understand the two rifle shots, and I did 
not like the way in which the battery got 
jammed on the road. 



THE FLANK MOVEMENT. IO3 

The night wore away. Morning came, and 
we cooked breakfast at fires made of fence 
rails. We were in the best agricultural region 
that I had seen in Virginia. Many negro slaves 
were working in the fields. Some of the slaves 
did not quit their work to look at us. I saw 
none drop their tools and hail us with vocifer- 
ous shouts as liberators and eagerly join us, as 
I had been led to believe they would. 

Many of the farm-houses we passed were 
mansions built of brick, and around which piaz- 
zas ran. On these women and children, and 
old, white-haired men stood in silent groups, 
and looked intently at us. I saw no young 
men, no white men fit for war, around any of 
these farm-houses. There were many barns and 
sheds and groups of negro quarters. We, the 
ever-hungry, predatory enlisted men, quickly 
discovered that we were marching through a 
corn- and tobacco and stock-raising country, and 
we raided tobacco barns in a quiet manner, and 
killed some sheep and many chickens, and much 
food was stolen from the farm-houses. I paid a 
pale-faced woman, whose little children clung 
to her skirts as she stood in her kitchen door 
appealing to the Union soldiers not to strip her 
of stores as she had children to feed, $2 in 



I04 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE. 

greenbacks for a piece of sweet bacon, which I 
had found in a barn, where an aged negro stood, 
solemnly assuring the predatory soldiers that 
there was not a bite of food on the place. This 
at a large brick house a mile or two outside of 
Bowling Green. 

Before noon we came to the village of Bowl- 
ing Green, where many pretty girls stood at 
cottage windows or doors, and even as close to 
the despised Yankees as the garden gates, and 
looked scornfully at us as we marched through 
the pretty town to kill their fathers and broth- 
ers. There was one very attractive girl, black- 
eyed and curly-haired, and clad in a scanty 
calico gown, who stood by a well in a house 
yard. She looked so neat, so fresh, so ladylike 
and pretty, that I ran through the open gate 
and asked her if I might fill my canteen with 
water from the well. And she, the haughty 
Virginia maiden, refused to notice me. She 
calmly looked through me and over me, and 
never by the slightest sign acknowledged my 
presence ; but I filled my canteen, and drank 
her health. I liked her spirit. 

It was a weary march, but a march during 
which there was no straggling. We could look 
back from hill tops and see the long steel-tipped 



THE FLANK MOVEMENT. I05 

column stretching for miles behind us. There 
was some anxiety among the enlisted men, but 
not much, as we were confident that we would 
not be called upon to fight more than half of 
Lee's army, if we had to fight at all, and we be- 
lieved that the Second Corps, which we judged 
to number 30,000 men, could whip an equal 
number of Confederates in the open. At least 
we could try it, and a fight of that character 
would have been an agreeable change from as- 
saulting earthworks. At noon we halted for 
dinner, and spent an hour or two in cooking 
and eating, and in lying on the ground talking 
and smoking the good tobacco we had stolen, 
and in sleeping. 

Again we marched. By the middle of the 
afternoon one of my comrades called my atten- 
tion to a dust column which rose away off to 
our right behind the crest of a ridge, and which 
moved parallel with us. The news spread up 
and down the column that we had been out- 
marched, and that wherever we stopped there 
we would find Longstreet's corps. How did we 
know that Longstreet's soldiers were to oppose 
us ? I cannot tell. But I record the fact that 
we did know it, as an instance of the accuracy 
of the information the enlisted men of the 



I06 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE. 

Army of the Potomac possessed. That after- 
noon I dropped behind the battery to talk to 
some country boys who were serving in an in- 
fantry regiment — boys who were raised in 
Columbia County, New York, and who lived on 
farms that surrounded my family's homestead. 
To them I expressed my anxiety at being so 
far in advance of the main army. I was prompt- 
ly reassured and encouraged by a young line 
sergeant, who said : 

" That dust you see over yonder is kicked up 
by Longstreet's men. They were on the Con- 
federate right at Spottsylvania. As soon as 
the Confederates missed the Second Corps 
from the battle-line, they knew that we had 
been dispatched on a flanking movement, and 
Lee started Longstreet toward Richmond to 
intercept us. Now we have been fighting 
Longstreet's corps for two weeks and better, 
and we all know that he has not more than 
fifteen thousand soldiers. The Confederates 
are not sufficiently numerous to fight us in the 
open. Longstreet will not attack the Second 
Corps unless he is heavily reinforced. There 
lies our only danger. See here, Frank," he 
said, as he laid his hand on my shoulder to call 
my attention away from the dust column. " See 



THE FLANK MOVEMENT, lO/ 

here. Listen to a little common-sense. Lee 
knows that the Second Corps has been detached 
from our main army. He knows that Grant 
has not more than sixty-five thousand men re- 
maining with him. " Now, my boy," he solemnly 
said, " if Lee had a sufficient number of men in 
his entire army to enable him to whip Grant's 
sixty-five thousand, he would have jumped on 
him savagely the very instant he discovered 
that the Second Corps had been detached. The 
fact that he has not sufficient men to whip 
sixty-five-thousand Union soldiers is plainly in- 
dicated by that dust column. If Lee had fifty 
thousand men he would probably risk a battle 
with Grant's weakened army. He has not got 
them. The only danger we are in, is that Lee 
may be marching with his entire army to jump 
on the Second Corps. If that is his plan, and 
I think it is not, he had better put it into exe- 
cution speedily, because in less than an hour 
after we halt this evening we will be intrenched, 
2_^A once behind earthworks the Second Corps 
can whip the entire Confederate army." The 
line sergeant clearly expressed the thoughts 
and feelings of all the intelligent volunteers. I 
have quoted him to illustrate the accuracy of 
military reasoning that enabled the enlisted 



I08 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE. 

men of American blood to correctly judge of 
the state of the campaign. How did the men 
acquire their information ? From prisoners 
whom they captured, from fellow-soldiers serv- 
ing in the cavalry, from negroes, and above all 
from the *' news-gatherers," the soldiers who 
walked the battle-lines in the night. 

Morally strengthened and braced up by the 
sergeant's talk, I ran ahead and rejoined my 
gun. Toward evening I saw troops defiling to 
the left of the road ahead of us, and as soon as 
they halted dirt began to fly and intrenchments 
to rise out of the ground. My battery was di- 
rected to camp on a slight elevation, which a 
staff ofBcer indicated with a gleaming sabre. 
We swung into battery. To our front and 
right, distant about a thousand yards, was a 
large white store, and near it stood a couple of 
smaller buildings. The men of Battery K, 
Fourth United States Artillery, which stood in 
battery to our left, manned a gun, and almost 
instantly a shell screamed through the air and 
burst close to a group of Confederate scouts, 
who sat on their horses in front of the white 
store watching us. They disappeared, and I 
saw no other Confederate soldiers at Milford 
Station. Our line of defence was quickly 



' THF FLANK MOVEMENT, IO9 

chosen, and at once the men began to fortify 
it. Here they pushed the Hne out, there they 
drew it back, taking advantage of the ground 
and fortifying it as their experience had taught 
them was best. In an hour a Hne of earth- 
works was thrown up which the Second Corps 
could have held for days against all the Confed- 
erates whom Lee could have massed to the as- 
sault. To our left, distant about eight hundred 
yards, and in a point of heavy oak timber, lay 
an Irish brigade— tough, jovial fellows, and 
stanch fighters. They built the crack intrench- 
ment of the line. 

The hard marching of the flank movement 
was over. That night we slept, and the next 
day we slept again and rested. North Anna 
was ahead of us. The Wilderness and Spott- 
sylvania, where so many of our comrades lay 
dead on the ground, were of the past. 



VII. 

STUDYING CONFEDERATE EARTHWORKS AT 
NORTH ANNA. 

MAY 23, 1864. The Army of the Potomac 
approached the North Anna River 
In front of the Second Corps (Hancock's) was 
the Chesterfield wagon bridge, and a mile below 
a railroad bridge spanned the river. The wa-on 
bridge was protected by a heavy but small 
earthwork on one side of the river. The rear 
of this work was open. It was full of men, but 
there were no guns in it. In front of it we 
could plainly see the Confederate pickets lyino- 
in their rifle-pits. The railroad bridge was prot 
tected by a heavy two-gun fortification stand- 
ing on the other side of the river. A mile 
beyond the river the main line of Confederates 
lay in their trenches. While our troops were 
deploying, the battery I belonged to was or- 
dered to take position on the crest of a ridge 
that overlooked the railroad bridge earthwork, 



no 



CONFEDERATE EARTHWORKS. HI 

and to begin firing at once. The officer who 
brought our captain this order dwelt strongly 
on the necessity of haste in getting into action, 
as the infantry, so he said, were to assault both 
earthworks. I smiled at the absurd statement 
that tired, exhausted infantry were to assault an 
earthwork that lay on the other side of a deep 
stream; but the pace at which the battery 
moved caused the smile to fade from my face as 
I ran at the side of my gun. We swung into 
action on the crest of the ridge. The sponge 
staffs were unchained, and the gunners quickly 
sprang too and fro, in and out, from the guns, 
and we opened the battle as far as the Second 
Corps was concerned. There was a loud noise 
behind us. I looked back as I sprang clear of 
the muzzle of the gun I was serving and saw 
other batteries galloping toward us. Bugles 
were blown, officers shouted, and the guns went 
into battery alongside of us, until about thirty 
pieces surmounted the crest. Then a brigade 
of infantry came marching up to support us. 
There were not a sufficient number of Confed- 
erates on our side of the river, outside of the 
Chesterfield works, to have captured a beehive, 
let alone thirty pieces of artillery. We fired 
rapidly and accurately at the sand-bank behind 



1 1 2 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVA TE. 

which the Confederate artillerists lurked, and 
with the usual effect, of doing nothing. I 
saw shells burst all over the work and ^iny 
clouds of dust rise from it, as though it were a 
big puff ball which we occasionally and gently 
squeezed. The rebel guns replied slowly. 
Thirty guns against two old howitzers ! It was 
rather a one-sided fight, and the inequality was 
calculated to make the service of the howitzers 
rather slow, but still they were served. We 
could see the Confederate gunners rise out of 
the ground, could see them load and then sink 
out of sight, could see the gunner bend over 
the piece and then raise his hand to No. 4 ; in- 
stantly a cloud of smoke would shoot out of 
the gun, and from it a black ball would rise and 
come screeching toward us. We were, as I 
said, firing rapidly, and shell were bursting over 
the Confederate earthwork at the rate of about 
three in two seconds. We had got the range 
to an inch. The plain beyond the work was 
furrowed and torn with shell. . The works must 
have quivered with the steady and heavy 
shocks. I can imagine no hotter place than 
that little fort was. I tired of my work, and 
asked a spare man to take the sponge while I 
rested. He cheerfully did so, and I sat on the 



CONFEDERA TE EARTHWORKS. 1 1 3 

ground to one side of the battery, and filled a 
pipe with plug tobacco, and smoked and 
watched the Confederate earthwork through my 
field-glass. I had about lost interest in the one- 
sided"" affair, when I saw an officer on a milk- 
white horse ride forth from the woods in the 
rear of the Confederate work. Confident that 
he would be torn to bits by shells, I dropped 
my pipe, and glued my glass on him and 
waited for the tragedy. He trotted briskly 
over the plain where shell were thickly bursting, 
and into the fort. I saw him hand a paper to 
the officer in command of the work. He sat 
calmly on his horse, and talked and gesticulated 
as quietly as though he were on dress parade. 
My heart went out to that man. I hoped he 
would not be killed. I wished I had the aiming 
of the guns. He lifted his hand in salute to 
the visor of his cap. He turned his white 
horse and rode slowly across the open ground, 
where shot and shell were thickly coursing. 
Dust rose above him. Tiny clouds of smoke 
almost hid him from view. Shot struck the 
ground and skipped past him, but he did not 
urge his horse out of a walk. He rode as 
though lost in meditation and deaf to the up- 
roar that raged around him. He rode into the 



I H RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVA TE. 

woods, disappeared in the timber, and was safe. 
With a '' Thank God that that brave man was 
not killed," I rejoined my gun and resumed 
work at the fruitless task of trying to batter 
down a sand-bank. 

Below us to our right, infantry had taken 
position in a sheltered ravine. There were two 
thousand men lying down there. There were 
a few men along the crest of the ravine on the 
side next to the Chesterfield bridge head, and 
they continually made motions to their com- 
rades who were lying in the bottom. Farther 
to the right were two sections of artillery in 
action. They were firing rapidly at the bridge 
head, which did not answer. We pounded away 
at our fort for a couple of hours longer, then, 
about six o'clock, I heard the familiar charging 
cheer. Looking to the right I saw a heavy line 
of blue-coated infantry move swiftly forth from 
a forest, and rapidly run at the fort in a fairly 
good line. The Confederate pickets fired and 
then ran to their fortification, which instantly 
began to smoke in jets and puffs and curls as 
an immense pudding, and men in the blue- 
coated line fell headlong, or backward, or sank 
into little heaps. The charging infantry, Price's 
and Eagan's brigades of the Second Corps, were 



CON FED ERA TE EAR TH WORKS. 1 1 5 

accompanied by an officer on horseback, who, 
in the most gallant manner rode his horse up 
and down the charging line and bravely en- 
couraged his men, and excited the admiration 
of the artillerymen who saw him. Then the 
brigade in the ravine stood up and remained 
quiet. They were to make the second assault 
in case the first failed I suppose ; but the first 
did not fail. They swept on and ran over the 
earthwork, out of which the Confederate in- 
fantry ran, and streamed across the bridge. Our 
colors were on the work. We cheered, and our 
supports cheered. And then a fierce charging 
yell floated to us from the right, and smoke 
began to curl above the portion of the line held 
by the Fifth Corps. Then there was real fight- 
ing going on, not driving two hundred or four 
hundred men out of an earthwork by launching 
several thousand picked troops against them. 
We could see a part of the fight the Fifth 
Corps was engaged in, and could see that they 
had a hard struggle. It was as gallant a fight 
as ever I saw ; but the Fifth Corps got decided- 
ly the worst of it, and came mighty near being 
driven into the river. We were very anxious 
about this fighting, as we always were about 
heavy fighting that we did not share in. The 



1 16 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVA TE. 

unseen danger is the alarming one to the en- 
listed men. Before midnight two privates of 
the Twentieth Maine Infantry, then serving 
with Griffin's division of the Fifth Corps, came 
into the battery to gather news. They told us 
that the Fifth Corps had been surprised ; that 
they had been ordered at five o'clock to biv- 
ouac on the line they held, and that at that 
hour General Warren was soundly sleeping in a 
house north of the river and near the Jericho 
ford. They said that the adjutant of their 
regiment had twice crossed the river to carry 
word to Warren from General Griffin that the 
Confederates were massing for the attack, and 
that the first time he was unable to see Warren, 
being refused admittance to his room, and that 
on the second visit he was so vehement in his 
demands that he was admitted to the presence 
of the general, who snubbed him, and told him 
that the rebels would not attack; and after 
ordering the troops to camp on the line, he 
turned over and slept. The adjutant returned 
to Griffin and reported, and had hardly done so 
when the Confederate assault was delivered. 
These intelligent Yankee infantrymen assured 
us that this story of the negligence of Warren 
was true, and that Griffin's division had saved 



CONFEDERA TE EAR TH WORKS. 1 1 7 

the Fifth Corps from rout when the battle 
opened, and that later, when liill massed 
against Cutler's division and broke it with a 
savage blow, Colonel McCoy, with the Eighty- 
third Pennsylvania, caught the Confederate 
charging column in flank and whipped them 
and captured over one thousand prisoners. 
" And haggard, hungry-looking men they are, 
too," said one of our Yankee visitors. ** Boys," 
he added impressively, " we are not living on 
the fat of the land ; but I looked into the haver- 
sacks of some of Hill's men as they passed to 
the rear, and none of them had more than a 
couple of handfuls of corn-meal in their canvas 
sacks. How they fight on corn-meal straight 
is more than I can understand," he added re- 
flectively. Our visitors arose, cast their eyes 
around in search of a full haversack, and, seeing 
that we regarded their inquisitive glances with 
hostile eyes, they laughed and walked off, first 
inviting us to visit them when they got into 
permanent camp and eat doughnuts. 

Next morning we crossed the river. We 
passed the fort which we had bombarded the 
previous day. Two men with shovels could 
have repaired the damage it had suffered in two 
hours, and we had buried tons of good iron in 



1 18 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVA TE. 

it. As soon as we drew away from tlie river 
bank and reached a point where we could plain- 
ly see the Confederate lines, we saw that Lee's 
soldiers were skilfully intrenched and that the 
Army of the Potomac could not dislodge them. 
That fact was instantly comprehended by the 
enlisted men who inspected the works at close 
range. We threw up parallel intrenchments 
and impatiently waited for our generals to dis- 
cover that the position could not be forced. 
The Confederate line was much shorter than 
ours, and was shaped like a wide-opened ox- 
bow. They could have supplied troops to any 
point attacked. Our men shrank from assault- 
ing these works. The pickets had been close 
to them, and they one and all asserted that the 
position was impregnable when held by the 
Army of Northern Virginia. 

One day, as we lay in our earthworks under 
a sharpshooters' fire, I saw a civilian clad in a 
long linen duster ride toward our battery. I 
thought he had a queer idea of a pleasure trip. 
To my great amazement he rode into the bat- 
tery and asked if I were present. I was, and 
promptly said so. '* Well, if you are the man, 
and I guess you are, here is a package of to- 
bacco your father has sent to you," he said, 



CONFEDERA TE EAR TH WORKS. 1 1 9 

handing me a couple of pounds of plug tobacco. 
This, under a brisk picket and sharpshooters* 
fire. He dismounted from his horse and stood 
by his side, and talked to me for a moment or 
two, and I heartily wished he would go away. 
He told me that he was a New York Tribune cor- 
spondent. He smiled, pointed to a couple of 
dead men, and said, as he raised his eyebrows 
inquiringly : '' Rather warm here, eh ? Sharp- 
shooters got the range, but," looking toward 
the woods where those murderous men lurked, 
" it is a long shot." Then he bade me good-by, 
and coolly mounted and deliberately rode off. 

One day some men of the Fortieth New York 
Infantry came to my battery to gamble. I took 
a hand in a game of seven-up for a dollar a cor- 
ner and five on the rubber. We spread a blan- 
ket on the ground behind the earthworks and 
squatted around it. My partner, a Fortieth 
New York soldier, was a heavy-jawed light- 
haired, blue-eyed lad of nineteen, an Albany 
boy, who played well, and fought well too. He 
was a wit, and when in the humor would make 
a whole regiment of sick men laugh. We were 
a few dollars winners, and he was graphically 
and humorously describing the brigade of regu- 
lars running against a swamp in the Wilder- 



I20 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE, 

ness, and the mythical conversation between 
the gray-haired commander and the second 
lieutenant, just out of West Point, as the old 
soldier asked if there was any thing in the new 
books about getting a brigade across a swamp, 
was delicious. As we laughed the handsome 
lad fell face down into the blanket and began 
to vomit blood. We grabbed him, turned him 
over, tore up his shirt, and saw where a ball 
had entered his side, cutting a gash instead of 
a hole. The wounded soldier did not speak. 
The blood rushed out of his mouth, his eyes 
glazed, his jaw dropped — he was dead. A 
chance ball had struck the tire of one of the 
wheels of the No. i gun and glanced forward 
and killed this delightful comrade. His death 
ended the game. We put his body alongside 
of a couple of other dead men and buried the 
three that night. 

The picket-firing and sharpshooting at North 
Anna was exceedingly severe and murderous. 
We were greatly annoyed by it, and as a cam- 
paign cannot be decided by killing a few hun- 
dred enlisted men — killing them most unfairly 
and when they were of necessity exposed, — it 
did seem as though the sharpshooting pests 
should have been suppressed. Our sharp- 



CON FED ERA TE EAR TH WORKS. 1 2 1 

shooters were as bad as the Confederates, and 
neither of them were of any account as far as 
decisive results were obtained. They could 
sneak around trees or lurk behind stumps, or 
cower in wells or in cellars, and from the safety 
of their lairs murder a few men. Put the 
sharpshooters in battle-line and they were no 
better, no more effective, than the infantry of 
the line, and they were not half as decent. 
There was an unwritten code of honor among 
the infantry that forbade the shooting of men 
while attending to the imperative calls of na- 
ture, and these sharpshooting brutes were con- 
stantly violating that rule. I hated sharp- 
shooters, both Confederate and Union, in those 
days, and I was always glad to see them killed. 
Before we left North Anna I discovered that 
our infantry were tired of charging earthworks. 
The ordinary enlisted men assert that one good 
man behind an earthwork was equal to three 
good men outside of it, and that they did not 
propose to charge many more intrenched lines. 
Here I first heard savage protests against a 
continuance of the generalship which consisted 
in launching good troops against intrenched 
works which the generals had not inspected. 
Battle-tried privates came into the battery and 



122 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE. 

sneeringly inquired if the corps and army com- 
manders had been to see our line. Of course 
we replied '' No." "Well," said one sergeant 
of the Pennsylvania reserve, " I have fought in 
this army for three years, and in no other cam- 
paign have I seen so many general officers shirk 
as they have in this one. I saw the Confeder- 
ate lines at close range last night," he added, 
" and they cannot be assaulted with any pros- 
pect of success. If Grant, or Meade, or Han- 
cock, or Warren, or Wright, or Burnside would 
inspect those works at close range, they would 
see the folly of staying here, where we are 
losing two hundred or three hundred men every 
day by sharpshooters. We ought to get out of 
here and try it farther down." He but ex- 
pressed what we all thought. At North Anna 
the rank and file of the Potomac army, the 
men who did the fighting, and who had been 
under fire for three weeks, began to grow dis- 
couraged. 

We lay for three days in the trenches at 
North Anna. Three days of woe and sorrow 
and hardship. Three days, during which there 
had been some exceedingly severe fighting, and 
which had cost us hundreds of men and line 
officers. How we longed to get away from 



CONFEDERA TE EA R TH WORKS. 1 2 3 

North Anna, where we had not the slightest 
chance of success, and how we feared that 
Grant would keep sending us to the slaughter ! 
Joyfully we received the order to march on the 
night of May 26th. Eagerly the tired troops 
fell into line behind their foul intrenchments. 
With pleasure we recrossed the North Anna 
and resumed the flank movement to the south. 
That night, after crossing the river, we rested, 
and had a good night's sleep, undisturbed by 
picket-firing. We awoke the next morning to 
find the rest of the army gone, and we started 
after them, being for the first and last time 
during the campaign in the rear. Before us, in 
the distance, rose the swells of Cold Harbor, 
and we marched steadily and joyfully to our 
doom. 



VIII. 

THE BATTLE OF COLD HARBOR. 

ON the morning of May 28, 1864, the Sec- 
ond Corps crossed the Pamunkey River. 
Close by the bridge on which we crossed, and 
to the right of it, under a tree, stood Generals 
Grant, Meade, and Hancock, and a little back 
of them was a group of staff officers. Grant 
looked tired. He was sallow. He held a dead 
cigar firmly between his teeth. His face was 
as expressionless as a pine board. He gazed 
steadily at the enlisted men as they marched 
by, as though trying to read their thoughts, and 
they gazed intently at him. He had the power 
to send us to our deaths, and we were curious 
to see him. But the men did not evince the 
slightest enthusiasm. None cheered him, none 
saluted him. Grant stood silently looking at 
his troops and listening to Hancock, who was 
talking and gesticulating earnestly. Meade 
stood by Grant's side and thoughtfully stroked 
his own face. I stepped from the column and 

124 



THE BATTLE OF COLD HARBOR. 12$ 

filled my canteens in the Pamunkey River, and 
looked my fill at the generals and their staffs, 
and then ran by the marching troops through a 
gantlet of chaff, as '' Go it, artillery," " The ar- 
tillery is advancing," '' Hurry to your gun, my 
son, or the battle will be lost," and similar sar- 
castically good-natured remarks, which were 
calculated to stimulate my speed. 

During- the afternoon we heard considerable 
firing in front of us, and toward evening we 
marched over ground where dead cavalrymen 
were plentifully sprinkled. The blue and the 
gray lay side by side, and their arms by them. 
With the Confederates lay muzzle-loading car- 
bines, the ramrods of which worked upward on 
a swivel hinge fastened near the muzzle of the 
weapon. It was an awkward arm and far in- 
ferior to the Spencer carbine wdth which our 
cavalry was armed. There were ancient and 
ferocious-looking horse-pistols, such as used to 
grace the Bowery stage, lying by the dead Con- 
federates. The poverty of the South was 
plainly shown by the clothing and equipment 
of her dead. These dead men were hardly stiff 
when we saw them. All of their pockets had 
been turned inside out. That night, while 
searching for fresh, clean water, I found several 



126 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE, 

dead cavalrymen in the woods, where they had 
probably crawled after being wounded. I 
struck a match so as to see one of these men 
plainly, and was greatly shocked to see large 
black beetles eating the corpse. I looked at no 
more dead men that night. 

The next day the sound of battle arose again. 
At distant points it would break out furiously 
and then die down. In our immediate front 
heavy skirmishing was going on, and wounded 
men began to drift to the rear in search of hos- 
pitals. They said that there was a stream of 
water, swamps, and a line of earthworks, behind 
which lay the Confederate infantry, in our front, 
and that we could not get to the works. At no 
time did the fire rise to a battle's volume ; it 
was simply heavy and continuous skirmishing, 
in which our men fought at great disadvantage,' 
and were severely handled. Finding that these 
works were too strong to be taken by assault. 
Grant moved the army to the left. On June 
1st we heard heavy fighting to our left, and 
that night we learned that a portion of the 
Sixth Corps, aided by ten thousand of Butler's 
men from Bermuda Hundreds, had forced the 
Chickahominy River at a loss of three thousand 
men, and that they held the ground they had 



THE BATTLE OF COLD HARBOR. 12/ 

taken. The news-gatherers said that the Con- 
federates were strongly intrenched, and evi- 
dently had no intention of fighting in the open. 
We knew that a bloody battle was close at 
hand, and instead of being elated the enlisted 
men were depressed in spirits. That night the 
old soldiers told the story of the campaign under 
McClellan in 1862. They had fought over 
some of the ground we were then camped on. 
Some of the men were sad, some indifferent ; 
some so tired of the strain on their nerves that 
they wished they were dead and their troubles 
over. The infantry knew that they were to 
be called upon to assault perfect earthworks, 
and though they had resolved to do their best, 
there was no eagerness for the fray, and the 
impression among the intelligent soldiers was 
that the task cut out for them was more than 
men could accomplish. 

On June 2d the Second Corps moved from 
the right to the left. We saw many wounded 
men that day. We crossed a swamp or marched 
around a swamp, and the battery I belonged to 
parked in a ravine. There were some old houses 
on our line of march, but not a chicken or a 
sheep or a cow to be seen. The land was 
wretchedly poor. The night of June 2d was 



128 RE COLLE C TIONS OF A PRI VA TE. 

spent in getting into battle-line. There was 
considerable confusion as the infantry marched 
in the darkness. In our front we could see 
tongues of flames dart forth from Confederate 
rifles as their pickets fired in the direction of 
the noise they heard, and their bullets sang 
high above our heads. My battery went into 
position just back of a crest of a hill. Behind 
us was an alder swamp, where good drinking 
water gushed forth from many springs. Be- 
fore we slept we talked with some of the 
Seventh New York Heavy Artillery, and 
found that they were sad of heart. They knew 
that they were to go into the fight early 
in the morning, and they dreaded the work. 
The whole army seemed to be greatly de- 
pressed the night before the battle of Cold 
Harbor. 

Before daybreak of June 3d the light-artillery 
men were aroused. We ate our scanty break- 
fast and took our positions around the guns. 
All of us were loath to go into action. In 
front of us we could hear the murmurs of in- 
fantry, but it was not sufficiently light to see 
them. We stood leaning against the cool guns, 
or resting easily on the ponderous wheels, and 
gazed intently into the darkness in the direction 



THE BA TTLE OF COLD HARBOR. 1 29 

of the Confederate earthworks. How slowly 
dawn came! Indistinctly we saw moving 
figures. Some on foot rearward bound, cow- 
ards hunting for safety ; others on horseback 
riding to and fro near where we supposed the 
battle-lines to be ; then orderlies and servants 
came in from out the darkness leading horses, 
and we knew that the regimental and brigade 
commanders were going into action on foot. 
The darkness faded slowly, one by one the 
stars went out, and then the Confederate pickets 
opened fire briskly; then we could see the Con- 
federate earthworks, about six hundred yards 
ahead of us— could just see them and no more. 
They were apparently deserted, not a man was 
to be seen behind them ; but it was still faint 
gray hght. One of our gunners looked over 
his piece and said that he could see the sights, 
but that they blurred. We filled our sponge 
buckets with water and waited, the Confederate 
pickets firing briskly at us the while, but doing 
no damage. Suddenly the Confederate works 
were manned. We could see a line of slouch 
hats above the parapet. Smoke in great puffs 
burst forth from their line, and shell began to 
howl by us. Their gunners were getting the 
range. We sprung in and out from the three- 



130 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE. 

inch guns and replied angrily. To our left, to 
our right, other batteries opened ; and along 
the Confederate line cannon sent forth their 
balls searching for the range. Then their guns 
were silent. It was daylight. We, the light- 
artillery men, were heated with battle. The 
strain on our nerves was over. In our front 
were two lines of blue-coated infantry. One 
well in advance of the other, and both lying 
down. We were firing over them. The Con- 
federate pickets sprang out of their rifle pits 
and ran back to their main line of works. Then 
they turned and warmed the battery with long- 
range rifle practice, knocking a man over here, 
killing another there, breaking the leg of a 
horse yonder, and generally behaving in an ex- 
asperating manner. The Confederate infantry 
was always much more effective than their 
artillery, and the battery that got under the fire 
of their cool infantry always suffered severely. 
The air began to grow hazy with powder smoke. 
We saw that the line of slouch-hatted heads 
had disappeared from the Confederate earth- 
works, leaving heads exposed only at long 
intervals. Out of the powder smoke came an 
officer from the battle-lines of infantry. He told 
us to stop firing, as the soldiers were about to 



THE BA TTLE OF COLD HARBOR. 1 3 1 

charge. He disappeared to carry the message to 
other batteries. Our cannon became silent. The 
smoke drifted off of the field. I noticed that 
the sun was not yet up. Suddenly the fore- 
most line of our troops, which were lying on 
the ground in front of us, sprang to their feet 
and dashed at the Confederate earthworks at a 
run. Instantly those works were manned. Can- 
non belched forth a torrent of canister, the 
works glowed brightly with musketry, a storm 
of lead and iron struck the blue line, cutting 
gaps in it. Still they pushed on, and on, and 
on. But, how many of them fell ! They drew 
near the earthworks, firing as they went, and 
then, with a cheer, the first line of the Red 
Division of the Second Corps (Barlow's) swept 
over it. And there in our front lay, sat, and 
stood the second line, the supports ; why did 
not they go forward and make good the victory ? 
They did not. Intensely excited, I watched 
the portion of the Confederate line which our 
men had captured. I was faintly conscious of 
terrific firing to our right and of heavy and con- 
tinuous cheering on that portion of our line 
which was held by the Fifth and Sixth Corps. 
For once the several corps had delivered a sim- 
ultaneous assault, and I knew that it was to be 



132 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVA TE. 

now or never. The powder smoke curled 
lowly in thin clouds above the captured works. 
Then the firing became more and more thun- 
derous. The tops of many battle-flags could 
be seen indistinctly, and then there was a heavy 
and fierce yell, and the thrilling battle-cry of the 
Confederate infantry floated to us. '' Can our 
men withstand the charge ? " I asked myself. 
Quickly I was answered. They came into sight 
clambering over the parapet of the captured 
works. All organization was lost. They fled 
wildly for the protection of their second line 
and the Union guns, and they were shot by 
scores as they ran. The Confederate infantry 
appeared behind their works and nimbly climbed 
over, as though intent on following up their 
success, and their fire was as the fury of hell. 
We manned the guns and drove them to cover 
by bursting shell. How they yelled! How 
they swung their hats ! And how quickly their 
pickets ran forward to their rifle pits and sank 
out of sight ! The swift, brave assault had 
been bravely met and most bloodily repulsed. 
Twenty minutes had not passed since the in- 
fantry had sprung to their feet, and ten-thou- 
sand of our men lay dead or wounded on the 
ground. The men of the Seventh New York 



THE BATTLE OF COLD HARBOR. 1 33 

Heavy Artillery came back without their col- 
onel. The regiment lost heavily in enlisted 
men and line officers. Men from many com- 
mands sought shelter behind the crest of the 
hill we were behind. They seemed to be dazed 
and utterly discouraged. They told of the 
strength of the Confederate earthworks, and as- 
serted that behind the line we could see was 
another and stronger line, and all the enlisted 
men insisted that they could not have taken 
the second line even if their supports had fol- 
lowed them. These battle-dazed visitors drifted 
off after a while and found their regiments, but 
some of them drifted to the rear and to coffee 
pots. We drew the guns back behind the crest 
of the hill, and lay down in the sand and waited. 
I noticed that the sun was now about a half an 
hour high. Soldiers came to the front from the 
rear, hunting for their regiments, which had 
been practically annihilated as offensive engines 
of war. Occasionally a man fell dead, struck 
by a stray ball from the picket line. By noon 
the stragglers were mostly gathered up and had 
rejoined their regiments, and columns of troops 
began to move to and fro in our rear in the 
little valley formed by the alder swamp. A 
column of infantry marching by fours passed to 



134 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE. 

our right. I watched them, listlessly wondering 
if they were going to get something to eat, as I 
was hungry. I saw a puff of smoke between 
the marchers and myself, heard the report of a 
bursting shell, and twelve men of that column 
were knocked to the earth. Their officers 
shouted, '' Close up ! close up ! " The unin- 
jured men hurriedly closed the gap and 
marched on. The dead and wounded men lay 
on the ground, with their rifles scattered among 
them. 

Soon some soldiers came out of the woods and 
carried the wounded men off, but left the dead 
where they fell. We buried them that night. 
Then, as the day wore away, and the troops 
were well in hand again, I saw staff officers ride 
along the lines, and then I saw the regimental 
commanders getting their men into line. About 
four o'clock in the afternoon I heard the char- 
ging commands given. With many an oath at 
the military stupidity which would again send 
good troops to useless slaughter, I sprang to my 
feet and watched the doomed infantry. Men, 
whom I knew well, stood rifle in hand not more 
than thirty feet from me, and I am happy to 
state that they continued to so stand. Not a 
man stirred from his place. The army to a man 



THE BATTLE OF COLD HARBOR. 135 

refused to obey the order, presumably from 
General Grant, to renew the assault. I heard 
the order given, and I saw it disobeyed. Many 
of the enlisted men had been up to and over 
the Confederate works. They had seen their 
strength, and they knew that they could not be 
taken by direct assault, and they refused to 
make a second attempt. That night we began 
to intrench. 

By daylight we had our earthwork finished 
and were safe. The Seventh New York Heavy 
Artillery, armed as infantry, were intrenched 
about eighty yards in front of us. We were on 
the crest of a ridge ; they were below us. Be- 
hind us, for supports, were two Delaware regi- 
ments, their combined strength being about one 
hundred and twenty men. Back of us was the 
alder swamp, where springs of cool water 
gushed forth. The men in front of us had to 
go to these springs for water. They would 
draw lots to see who should run across the dan- 
gerous, bullet-swept ground that intervened be- 
tween our earthworks and theirs. This settled, 
the victim would hang fifteen or twenty can- 
teens around him ; then, crouching low in the 
rifle-pits, he would give a great jump, and when 
he struck the ground he was running at the top 



136 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE, 

of his speed for our earthwork. Every Con- 
federate sharpshooter within range fired at him. 
Some of these thirsty men were shot dead ; 
but generally they ran into the earthwork with 
a laugh. After filling their canteens, they 
would sit by our guns and smoke and talk, 
nerving themselves for the dangerous return. 
Adjusting their burden of canteens, they would 
go around the end of our works on a run and 
rush back over the bullet-swept course, and 
again every Confederate sharpshooter who saw 
them would fire at them. Sometimes these 
water-carriers would come to us in pairs. One 
day two Albany men leaped into our battery. 
After filling their canteens, they sat with us and 
talked of the beautiful city on the Hudson, and 
finally started together for their rifle-pits. I 
watched through an embrasure, and saw one 
fall. Instantly he began to dig a little hollow 
with his hands in the sandy soil, and instantly 
the Confederate sharpshooters went to work at 
him. The dust flew up on one side of him, and 
then on the other. The wounded soldier kept 
scraping his little protective trench in the sand. 
We called to him. He answered that his leg 
was broken below the knee by a rifle ball. 
From the rifle-pits we heard his comrades call 



THE BATTLE OF COLD HARBOR. 13/ 

to him to take off his burden of canteens, to 
tie their strings together, and to set them to 
one side. He did so, and then the thirsty men 
in the pits drew lots to see who should risk his 
life for the water. I got keenly interested in 
this dicing with death, and watched intently. 
A soldier sprang out of the rifle-pits. Running 
obliquely, he stooped as he passed the can- 
teens, grasped the strings, turned, and in a flash 
was safe. Looking through the embrasure, I 
saw the dust rise in many little puffs around 
the wounded man, who was still digging his 
little trench, and, with quickening breath, felt 
that his minutes were numbered. I noted a 
conspicuous man, who was marked with a 
goitre, in the rifle-pits, and recognized him as 
the comrade of the stricken soldier. He called 
to his disabled friend, saying that he was com- 
ing for him, and that he must rise when he 
came near and cling to him when he stopped. 
The hero left the rifle-pits on the run ; the 
wounded man rose up and stood on one foot ; 
the runner clasped him in his arms ; the arms 
of the wounded man twined around his neck, 
and he was carried into our battery at full 
speed, and was hurried to the rear and to a hos- 
pital. To the honor of the Confederate sharp- 



138 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE. 

shooters, be it said, that when they understood 
what was being done they ceased to shoot. 

One day during this protracted Cold Harbor 
fight, a battery of Cohorn mortars was placed 
in position in the ravine behind us. The cap- 
tain of this battery was a tall, handsome, sweet- 
voiced man. He spent a large portion of his 
time in our earthworks, watching the fire of his 
mortars. He would jump on a gun and look 
over the works, or he would look out through 
the embrasures. Boy-like, I talked to him. I 
would have talked to a field-marshal if I had 
met one. He told me many things relative to 
mortar practice, and I, in turn, showed him how 
to get a fair look at the Confederate lines with- 
out exposing himself to the fire of the sharp- 
shooters, most of whom we had " marked 
down." He playfully accused me of being 
afraid, and insisted that at six hundred yards 
a sharpshooter could not hit a man. But I 
had seen too many men killed in our battery to 
believe that. So he continued to jump ^on 
guns and to poke his head into embrasures. 
One day I went to the spring after water. 
While walking back I met four men carrying a 
body in a blanket. "Who is that?" I asked. 
" The captain of the mortars," was the reply. 



THE BATTLE OF COLD HARBOR. 139 

Stopping, they uncovered his head for me. I 
saw where the ball had struck him in the eye, 
and saw the great hole in the back of his head 
where it had passed out. 

The killed and wounded of the first day's 
fight lay unburied and uncared for between the 
lines. The stench of the dead men became un- 
bearable, and finally a flag of truce was sent 
out. There was a cessation of hostilities to 
bury the dead and to succor the wounded. I 
went out to the ground in front of our picket 
line to talk to the Confederate soldiers, and to 
trade sugar and coffee for tobacco. Every 
corpse I saw was as black as coal. It was not 
possible to remove them. They were buried 
where they fell. Our wounded— I mean those 
who had fallen on the first day on the ground 
that lay between the picket lines— were all 
dead. I saw no live man lying on this ground. 
The wounded must have suffered horribly 
before death relieved them, lying there exposed 
to the blazing southern sun o' days, and being 
eaten alive by beetles o' nights. 

One evening just before sunset I went to the 
spring to fill some canteens. Having filled 
them, I loaded my pipe and smoked in silent 
enjoyment. Looking up, I saw two Confeder- 



I40 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE. 

ate infantry soldiers walking slowly down the 
ravine. They were tall, round-shouldered men. 
I clasped my knees and stared at them. They 
walked toward me, then halted, and dropping 
their musket-butts to the ground, they clasped 
their hands over the muzzles of their rifles and 
stared at me as I stared at them. I could not 
understand what two fully armed Confederate 
soldiers could be doing within our lines. After 
gazing at one another in silence for an instant, 
one of them smiled (I could almost hear the 
dirt on his face crack, and was agreeably inter- 
ested in the performance) and inquired kindly, 
*' Howdy ? " So I said, still seated and suck- 
ing my pipe, '' Howdy," as that seemed to be 
the correct form of salutation in Virginia. 
Then I asked indifferently what they were 
doing within our lines. They told me that 
they had been captured and that they were on 
their way to our rear. That statement struck 
me as decidedly funny. I did not believe it, 
and my face expressed my disbelief. They 
then said that they were lost, that they were 
afraid to return to the front for fear of being 
killed, that they were afraid to keep on travel- 
ling for fear of running against the Union pick- 
ets on the flanks, and that they were out of 



THE BATTLE OF COLD HARBOR. U^ 

provisions and were hungry. That last state- 
ment appealed strongly to me. I imagined my- 
self prowling between the front and the rear of 
the Confederate army, with an empty haversack 
dangling at my side, and nothing to hope for 
but a Confederate prison, and my heart went 
out to these men. I opened my haversack and 
shared my hardtack with them, and then showed 
them the road which led to our rear. They 
sat down by the spring and ate the hard bread 
and drank of the cool water, and talked drawl- 
ingly of the war, and finally slouched off 
to the rear. At the time I thought them to 
be deserters. After dark, to replenish the 
waste of my charity, I visited the camp of 
some lOO-day men, and found a half-filled 
haversack. It was surprising what careless 
fellows those lOO-day men were. They were 
always losing something, haversacks generally, 
and we light-artillery men were constantly 

finding them. 

During the fighting of the fourth day, which 
was not severe, a head-quarters' orderly rode 
into the battery and delivered an order to our 
captain. He read it, and then calling me to 
him, handed me the order to read. With mili- 
tary brevity it commanded him to send Private 



142 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE. 

Frank Wilkeson to army head-quarters at once 
to report to Adjutant-General Seth Williams. 
My heart sank. I had been stealing haver- 
sacks. I had been exceedingly impudent to 
some officers. I had been doing a lot of 
things which I should not have done, and 
now I was in for it. ''Adjutant-General," I re- 
peated thoughtfully to myself. " That sounds 
rather savage." The captain said : '' Wash up 
and accompany the orderly. Get a horse from 
the chief of caissons and return promptly." 

I ignored the first portion of the order, but 
secured the horse and rode off, pants in boots 
slouch-hatted, flannel-shirted, blouseless, a strap 
around my waist and supremely dirty. I was 
tortured with the belief that I was to be pun- 
ished. A certain sheep, which I had met in a 
field near Bowling Green, weighed heavily on 
me. A large bunch of haversacks, which I had 
found o' nights, dangled before me. I ransacked 
my memory and dragged forth all my military 
misdeeds and breaches of discipline and laid 
them one after the other on my saddle-bow 
and thoughtfully turned them over and over 
and looked at them, regretfully at first, then 
desperately and recklessly. I knew that I 
ought to be court-martialed and that I de- 



THE BATTLE OF COLD HARBOR. 1 43 

served to be shot. I talked to the orderly, and 
asked what duties the adjutant-general perform- 
ed (I had an idea that he shot insubordinate pri- 
vates), and was immensely relieved to hear that 
he was the officer who issued orders — a very 
superior order of chief clerk, as it were. '' Is 
he savage-tempered ? " I asked. " Who, Gen- 
eral Williams? " my guide exclaimed in ques- 
tioning surprise. '' Not he," he answered ; ''he 
is the kindest-hearted man in the army." I was 
slightly reassured. 

I said : '' See here, what do you suppose he 
wants of me ? I do not know him and I do not 
want to know him. I have been disobeying 
orders, been stealing haversacks from infantry 
soldiers, and have been impudent to some in- 
competent officers. You do not suppose that 
I have been reported to head-quarters, do 
you r 

Loudly the orderly laughed and roundly he 
swore, and then he said : *' Not at all. No one 
cares how many haversacks you have stolen, 
excepting the men who lost them ; and as for 
being impudent to some of these officers, they 
deserve it. You need not be troubled. When 
a private is sent for and guided to head-quarters, 
he is not going to be hurt." 



144 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE. 

We rode into a village of tents, one of which 
was pointed out to me as General Williams'. 
Sentinels paced to and fro ; nice, clean men 
they were too. I dismounted, hitched my 
horse, and walked to Williams' tent. I was 
halted, sent in my name, and was admitted. 
I strode in defiant, hat on head, expecting to 
be abused, and resolved to take a hand in the 
abuse business myself. Boy that I was, I was 
really frightened half out of my senses. 

I saw a handsome, kind-faced, middle-aged 
officer standing before me. He smiled kindly, 
and inquired, as he extended his hand to me, 
" Have I the pleasure of addressing Lieutenant 
Frank Wilkeson ?" My hat came off instantly; 
my heart went out to Seth Williams, and I re- 
plied : '' No, General ; I am Private Frank 
Wilkeson." He smiled again and looked curi- 
ously at me. How I did wish I had washed 
my face and brushed the dirt off of my clothes. 
He bade me to be seated, and skilfully set me 
to talking. He asked me many questions, and 
I answered as intelligently as I could. Grow- 
ing confidential, I told him that I had been 
dreadfully frightened by being summoned to 
head-quarters, and confessed the matters of the 
sheep and the haversacks, and my misconcep- 



THE BATTLE OF COLD HARBOR. 1 45 

tion of his duties. He tried to look severely 
^rave but laughed instead, and said pleasantly: 
-You' are not to be shot. The crimes you have 
committed hardly deserve that punishment. I 
have called you to me to say that Secretary of 
War Stanton has ordered your discharge, and 
that you are to be appointed a second lieuten- 
ant in the Fourth Regiment of United States 
Artillery When you want your discharge, 
claim it from your captain. He has the order 
to discharge you. When you get it, come to me 
if you need money to travel on, and I will lend 
you sufficient to take you to Washington and 
to buy you some clothing. When you arrive 
there, report to the Secretary of War, and he 
will tell you what to do." 

Kind Seth Williams! So gracious, and 
sweet, and sympathetic was he to me, a dirty 
private, that my eyes filled with tears, and I 
could not talk, could not thank him. I came 
within an ace of crying outright. I returned 
to my battery and resumed work on my gun. 
I thought that the Army of the Potomac might 
win the next battle, and end the war. If it 
did, I preferred to be a private in a volunteer 
battery which was serving at the front, rather 
than to be a lieutenant in the United States 



146 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE. 

Artillery, stationed at Camp Barry, near Wash- 
ington. 

On one of these six Cold Harbor days, when 
my battery was in action, I saw a party of 
horsemen riding toward us from the left. I 
smiled as the absurdity of men riding along a 
battle-line for pleasure filled my sense of the 
ridiculous ; but as I looked I saw that the party 
consisted of a civilian under escort. The party 
passed close behind our guns, and in passing 
the civilian exposed a large placard, which was 
fastened to his back, and which bore the words, 
" Libeler of the Press." We all agreed that he 
had been guilty of some dreadful deed, and 
were pleased to see him ride the battle-line. 
He was howled at, and the wish to tear him 
limb from limb and strew him over the ground 
was fiercely expressed. This man escaped 
death from the shot and shells and bullets that 
filled the air. I afterward met him in Wash- 
ington, and he told me that he was a newspaper 
war correspondent, and that his offence was in 
writing, as he thought, truthfully, to his journal, 
that General Meade advised General Grant to 
retreat to the north of the Rapidan after the 
battle of the Wilderness. 

One night, of these six Cold Harbor nights, 



THE BATTLE OF COLD HARBOR. 14/ 

I was on guard in the battery. I walked up 
and down behind the guns. Voices whispering 
outside of our work startled me. Then I heard 
men scrambling up the face of the earthwork. 
In the indistinct light I made out four. They 
were carrying something. They stood above 
me on the parapet, and in reply to my chal- 
lenge poked fun at me. They said they loved 
me, and had brought me a present. They 
threw down to me a dead man, and with a light 
laugh went off. I called to them to come 
back — insisted that they should carry their 
corpse and bury it, but they stood off in the 
darkness and laughed at me, and insisted that 
they had made me a present of him. " You 
can have him ; the battery can have him," and 
disappeared, leaving the dead man with me. 

I was young, and therefore soft ; and the 
lack of good food and loss of sleep told hard 
on me. Indeed, I got utterly used up. So one 
afternoon of this battle that lasted nearly a 
week, when but little was going on, I said to 
my sergeant : " I am exhausted, and want a 
night's sleep. I will dig a trench back here. 
If possible, let me sleep to-night, or I will be 
on the sick-list." He promised to let me sleep 
unless something urgent happened in the night. 



148 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE. 

I ate my supper, wrapped my blanket around 
me, and lay down in my trench. The guns 
roared about me, the bullets whistled over me; 
but, overcome with exhaustion, I fell into a 
deep sleep. I was awakened with a strong grip 
on my shoulders, was lifted up and violently 
shaken, and the earnest voice of the gunner 
told me to run to my gun. '' They have got 
an enfilading fire on us," the sergeant cried to 
me. Dazed, half awake, stupid frorh the deep 
sleep and coming sickness, I sat on the brink 
of my trench and wondered where I was. I 
heard, '' Ho, Frank! Yah ! No. i ! " sharply 
screamed. I heard the shot crash into our 
horses. Still not awake, I started for my gun. 
I saw the blaze of the fuses of the shells as they 
whizzed by. I saw countless fireflies ; and, in 
my exhausted, half-awake condition, I con- 
founded the shells and fireflies together, and 
thought they were all shells. The shock to me, 
in my weak, nervous condition, when I saw, as 
I thought, the air actually stiff with shells, re- 
quired all my pride to stand up under. It 
woke me up and left me with a fit of trembling 
that required ten minutes warm work at the 
guns to get rid of. The enfilading fire did not 
amount to much, and I soon returned to my 
trench and deep sleep. 



THE BATTLE OF COLD HARBOR. 149 

One day four men carrying a pale infantry- 
man stopped for an instant in my battery. The 
wounded man suffered intensely from a wound 
through the foot. My sympathy was excited 
for the young fellow, and as we at the moment 
were doing nothing, I asked for half an hour's 
leave. Getting it, I accompanied him back into 
the woods to one of the Second Corps' field 
hospitals. Here, groaning loudly, he awaited 
his turn, which soon came. We hfted him on 
the rude table. A surgeon held chloroform to 
his nostrils, and under its influence he lay as if 
in death. The boot was removed, then the 
stocking, and I saw a great ragged hole on the 
sole of the foot where the ball came out. Then 
I heard the coatless surgeon who was making 
the examination cry out, '' The cowardly 
whelp ! " So I edged around and looked over 
the shoulders of an assistant surgeon, and saw 
that the small wound on the top of the foot, 
where the ball entered, was blackened with 
powder ! I, too, muttered *' The coward " and 
was really pleased to see the knife and saw put 
to work and the craven's leg taken off below 
the knee. He was carried into the shade of a 
tree, and left there to wake up. I watched the 
skilful surgeons probe and carve other patients. 



ISO RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE, 

The little pile of legs and arms grew steadily, 
while I waited for the object of my misplaced 
sympathy to recover his senses. With a long 
breath he opened his eyes. I was with him at 
once, and looked sharply at him. I will never 
forget the look of horror that fastened on his 
face when he found his leg was off. Utter hope- 
lessness and fear that look expressed. I enter- 
ed into conversation with him ; and he, weak- 
ened and unnerved by the loss of the leg, and 
the chloroform, for once told the truth. Lying 
on his back, he aimed at his great toe, meaning 
to shoot it off; but being rudely joggled by a 
comrade at the critical instant, his rifle covered 
his foot just below the ankle, and an ounce ball 
went crashing through the bones and sinews. 
The wound, instead of being a furlough, was a 
discharge from the army, probably into eternity. 
Our guns at the front began to howl at the Con- 
federates again, and I was forced to leave the 
hospital. So I hastened back to my guns. The 
utter contempt of the surgeons, their change 
from careful handling to almost brutality, when 
they discovered the wound was self-inflicted, 
was bracing to me. I liked it, and rammed 
home the ammunition in gun No. i with vim. 
Constantly losing men in our earthwork, 



THE BATTLE OF COLD HARBOR. 151 

shot not in fair fight, but by sharpshooters, we 
all began to loathe the place. At last, one after- 
noon the captain ordered us to level the corn- 
hills between the battery and the road, so that 
we could withdraw the guns without making a 
noise. At once understanding that a flank move- 
ment was at hand, we joyfully gathered up 
shovels and spades, and went at the obstructions 
with a will. No. 3 of No. I gun, an Albany man, 
was at my side. I was bent over shovelling. 
I straightened myself up. He leaned over to 
sink his shovel, pitched forward in a heap, dead, 
and an artilleryman beyond him clasped his 
stomach and howled a death howl. No. 3 was 
shot from temple to temple. The ball passed 
through his head and hit the other man in the 
stomach, fatally wounding him. They were the 
last men our battery lost at Cold Harbor. 

That evening the horses were brought up, 
and all the guns but mine, No. i, were taken 
off. We sat and watched them disappear in the 
darkness. Soon heavy columns of infantry 
could be indistinctly seen marching by the alder 
swamp in our rear. Then all was quiet, ex- 
cepting the firing of the pickets. We sat and 
waited for the expected advance of the Con- 
federates ; but they did not come. Towards 



152 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE, 

midnight an officer rode into the earthwork and 
asked lowly who was in command. The sergeant 
stepped forward and received his orders. Turn- 
ing to us he whispered, " Limber to the rear. " 
Silently the horses swung around. The gun 
was limbered, and, with the caisson in the lead, 
we pulled out of the earthwork, slowly drove 
across the cornfield, struck into a dusty road in 
the forest, and marched for the James River 
and the bloody disasters that awaited us be- 
yond that beautiful stream. 



IX. 

FIGHTING AROUND PETERSBURG. 

ON the night of June 14, 1864, the battery 
to which I belonged went into park 
close to the James River, but not within sight 
of it. I well remember the camping ground, 
because I endeavored to get water out of a 
large spring which gushed from beneath a wide- 
spreading tree, which stood to the rear and 
right of a plantation house, where either a divi- 
sion or corps head-quarters had been established. 
The spring flowed freely. It had been boxed, 
and there was plenty of water for thousands of 
men in the box. The water in the sluggish 
runs had been roiled by artillery horses drinking, 
and been additionally befouled by hundreds of 
vermin-infested men bathing in it. The water 
in the spring was clear and cool, and I, with a 
dozen of my comrades, wanted some of it, but 
we did not get it. An alert sentinel stood over 
this water. He had orders to keep the waters 

153 



154 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE. 

of the spring sacred, to keep them unpolluted 
by the touch of enlisted men's canteens or cof- 
fee pots. At the time I protested savagely 
against the official selfishness which denied the 
use of the only clean water in the region to the 
men who did the fighting. The sentinel was 
ashamed to keep us from the water, but, as he 
said, he had to obey orders. That night I 
strained the muddy, foul water of the run 
through a blanket to get water to make coffee 
and to fill my canteen. We were almost out of 
food. I was entirely so. 

On the morning of June 15th we moved 
close to the James River and parked. I was 
lying under a tree near an old and abandoned 
house. Below me and a little to my left a pon- 
toon bridge stretched across the muddy waters 
of the river James. A few steamboats were 
paddling to and fro, some ferrying troops 
across the river, others apparently doing noth- 
ing. The Second Corps troops were rapidly 
marching across the pontoon bridge, which 
swayed up and down under their heavy tread. 
On the other side was a village of tents and 
great piles of boxes. Many men were swim- 
ming in the river. 

I had had no supper, no breakfast, and I was 



FIGHTING AROUND PETERSBURG, IS5 

exceedingly hungry. One of my comrades and 
I were dolefully discussing the emptmess of our 
stomachs, when we saw an old, gray-haired 
negro walking past us. His tattered shirt was 
open at the breast, displaying a coat of moss- 
like, gray hair. His feet were bare. One of 
his hands grasped a cane, made of a piece of 
hickory sapling with prominent knobs on it, to 
help his legs support his withered old body. In 
his other hand he carried an aged and battered, 
but bright, tin pail. I hailed him, saying: 
- Uncle, come here." He stood in front of us, 
with water running out of his bleary eyes. He 
was exceedingly old and feeble. I said : " Uncle, 
we are hungry. There is a safeguard on those 
buildings," indicating a group of houses with 
outstretched arm, ''and we cannot plunder 
them. Can you get us something to eat ? 
The old negro looked doubtfully from my com- 
rade to me, and then back to my comrade. He 
hesitated to offer us what he had. Then he 
lifted the lid of his pail and dropped his long, 
lean, withered hand into it and drew forth a 
hoe-cake— a thick, brown hoe-cake— and hand- 
ed it to me. I was ashamed to take it. But 
the old slave assured me that he had a store 
of meal laid by, and that he would not suffer. 



15^ RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE. 

So I took it and divided it with my comrade. 
The aged negro hobbled off to his work din- 
nerless. 

Infantry hurried past us ; batteries of artil- 
lery rolled by. We recognized some of the lat- 
ter, and said : " There goes K. of the Fourth 
United States Artillery " ; " That is the 
Twelfth New York Battery," and we waved our 
hands to the men whom we knew. There was 
a gap in the column of hurrying troops. Our 
captain swung himself into his saddle and com- 
manded : '' By piece from the right front into 
column, march ! " and we were off for Peters- 
burg. We crossed on the pontoon bridge, 
which had a peculiar earthquaky motion, and 
entered the village of tents. Thousands of 
boxes of hard bread and barrels of pork were 
there, but instead of being open and we helping 
ourselves as we marched, the troops were halted 
and jammed and irritated by having to stand 
around with open haversacks while a compara- 
tively few commissary employees slowly dealt 
out the precious provisions to us. Hours were 
worth millions of dollars each on this flank 
movement. They were really priceless, and we 
dawdled away three of them in getting a little 
food into our haversacks. This was Potomac 



FIGHTING AROUND PE TERSB URG. I 5 7 

Army economy. The Second Corps, if the 
boxes of hard bread and barrels of pork and 
coffee and sugar had Hned the road, and we en- 
Hsted men had helped ourselves, might have 
carried off $20,000 worth of extra provisions ; 
but we would have saved three hours, and they, 
if properly used, would have been worth $100,- 
000000 each, and would have saved thousands 
of men's lives also. But we fooled away the 
time; we stood and chaffed one another; and 
the cannon in our front roared and the mus- 
ketry rolled. Then we marched. We were in 
hi<-h spirits. We marched free. Every enlisted 
man in the Second Corps knew that we had 
outmarched the Confederates. We knew that 
some of our troops were assaulting the Con- 
federate works at Petersburg. The booming 
of the cannon cheered us. We were tired, 
hungry, worn with six weeks of continuous and 
blooV fighting and severe marching ; but now 
that we, the enlisted men of the Second Corps, 
knew that at last a flank movement had been 
successful, we wanted to push on and get into 
the fight and capture Petersburg. We knew 
that we had outmarched Lee's veterans, and 
that our reward was at hand. The Second 
Corps was in fine fettle. On all sides I heard 



158 RECOLLECTIONS OF A rRIVATE. 

men assert that Petersburg and Richmond were 
ours ; that the war would virtually be ended in 
less than twenty-four hours. 

Night came. The almost full moon arose 
above the woods and gold-flecked the dust 
column which rose above us. We had heard 
heavy firmg about sundown, and judged that 
we should be drawing near the battle-line We 
entered a pine woods, and there we met a mob 
of black troops, who were hauling some brass 
guns. They had attached long ropes to the 
limbers, and, with many shouts, were dragging 
them down the road. Some of them bore 
flammg torches of pine knots in their hands. 
Ihey sang, they shouted, they danced weirdly 
as though they were again in Congo villacres 
makmg medicine. They were happy, dir'Iy 
savagely excited, but they were not soldiers' 
As we, the Second Corps, met these victorious 
troops the eager infantrymen asked : " Where 
d,d you get those guns?" They replied: 
We uns captured them from the rebels to- 
day. ^ " Bah ! '• an infantry sergeant, who was 
marchmg by my side, exclaimed, " you nec^roes 
captured nothing from Lee's men. The city is 
ours. There is not a brigade of the Army of 
Northern Virginia ahead of us." And we all 



FIGHTING AROUND PETERSBURG. 159 

exclaimed : '^ The city is ours ! We have out- 
marched them ! " And we strode on through 
the dense dust clouds, with parched throats, 
footsore and weary. Not a grumble did I 
hear. But with set jaws we toiled on, intent on 
capturing Petersburg before the Army of North- 
ern Virginia got behind the works. It was 
" March, march, march 1 No straggling now. 
It is far better to march to-night than to assault 
earthworks defended by Lee's men to-morrow. 
Hurry along ! hurry, hurry, hurry ! " And we 
marched our best. We passed a group of sol- 
diers, who wore the distinctive badge of the 
Second Corps, cooking by the roadside, their 
muskets stacked by their fire. We asked how 
far it was to the battle-line. " Only a few hun- 
dred yards," they replied. Then we asked what 
Confederate troops were ahead of us. They 
answered, with a scornful laugh : '' Petersburg 
militia." We asked what Union troops were 
engaged, and they replied : " Some of But- 
ler's men." With the dislike all soldiers have 
for unknown troops, we said heartily: "Damn 
Butler's men ! We do not know them. We 
wish the Fifth or the Sixth Corps were here 
instead of them." Many soldiers anxiously 
inquired : '' Will Butler's men fight ? " Then 



l6o RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE. 

some private, who was better informed than the 
most of us, told us that Butler's men had been 
lying at Bermuda Hundreds, and that there 
were many negro troops among them. The 
noses of the Second Corps men were cocked 
sharply in the air at this information. 

Word was passed among us that the negro 
troops had had famous success that day ; that 
they had wrested a heavy line of earthworks 
from the Confederates, and had captured eigh- 
teen guns. The soldiers halted for an instant. 
They examined their rifles and shifted their 
cartridge-boxes to a position where they could 
get at them easily, and they drank deeply from 
their canteens. Then belts were tightened, 
blanket rolls shifted, the last bits of hard-tack 
the men had been chewing were swallowed, and 
their mouths again filled with water and rinsed 
out, and then throughout the ranks murmurs 
arose of : '' Now for it " ; " Put us into it, Han- 
cock, my boy ; we will end this damned re- 
bellion to-night ! " and we laughed lowly, and 
our hearts beat high. Soon we heard com- 
mands given to the infantry, and they marched 
off. My battery moved forward, twisted ob- 
liquely in and out among the stumps, and then 
the guns swung into battery on a cleared space. 



FIGHTING AROUND PETERSBURG. l6l 

And then — and then — we went to cooking. 
That night was made to fight on. A bright 
and almost full moon shone above us. The 
Confederate earthworks were in plain view be- 
fore us, earthworks which we knew were bare of 
soldiers. There was a noisy fire from the Con- 
federate pickets in front of us. So unnerved 
and frightened were they that their bullets sang 
hieh above us. We cooked and ate, and fool- 
ed the time away. This when every intelligent 
enlisted man in the Second Corps knew that 
not many miles away the columns of the Army 
of Northern Virginia were marching furiously 
to save Petersburg and Richmond and the Con- 
federacy. We could almost see those veteran 
troops, lean, squalid, hungry and battle torn, 
with set jaws and anxious-looking eyes, striding 
rapidly through the dust, pouring over bridges, 
crowding through the streets of villages, and 
ever hurrying on to face us. And we knew 
that once they got behind the earthworks in 
our front, we could not drive them out. They 
did not surrender cannon and intrenchments to 
disorderly gangs of armed negroes. They did 
not understand how troops could lose earth- 
works when assailed by equal numbers of sol- 
diers. Still we cooked and ate, and sat idly look- 



l62 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE. 

ing into one anothers eyes, questioningly at first, 
then impatiently and then angrily. Gradually 
the fact that we were not to fight that night im- 
pressed itself on us. I walked over to the lim- 
ber of my gun, opened my knapsack, and took 
out a campaign map and a pair of compasses. 
Returning to the fire the map was spread on the 
ground. As I measured the distances a group 
of excited soldiers gathered around and watch- 
ed the work. We had the less distance to 
march, about nine hours' the start, and allowing 
for the time lost at the crossing of the James 
River we were at ii P.M. four or five hours a- 
head of the Army of Northern Virginia. " Will 
they be in the works by morning, men?" I 
asked ; and all answered, *' By God, they will ! " 
Discouraged, I put away the map, loaded a pipe, 
lighted it, and strolled off down the line, stop- 
ping at almost every fire I came to to talk to 
the infantry soldiers. The rage of the intelli- 
gent enlisted men was devilish. The most 
blood-curdling blasphemy I ever listened to I 
heard that night, uttered by the men who knew 
they were to be sacrificed on the morrow. The 
whole corps was furiously excited. I returned 
to my battery a little after midnight. Seated 
on the ground I rested my back against one of 



FIGHTING AROUND PETERSBURG, 1 63 

the ponderous wheels of my gun. Resting 
there I slept. 

At early dawn I was awake and tried to ex- 
amine the Confederate line. I noticed that the 
noisy, wasteful picket-firing of the night before 
had ceased ; that the main line of earthworks, 
indistinctly seen in the gray light, was silent. 
Some of our infantry came into our slight earth- 
work, and we stood gazing into the indistinct- 
ness before us. All of us were greatly depressed. 

It grew lighter and lighter, and there be- 
fore us, fully revealed, was a long, high line of 
intrenchments, with heavy redoubts, where can- 
non were massed at the angles, silent, grim. 
No wasteful fire shot forth from that line. 
Now and then a man rose up out of the Con- 
federate rifle-pits, and a rifle-ball flew close 
above us, no longer singing high in the air. 
Sadly we looked at one another. We knew that 
the men who had fought us in the Wilderness, 
at Spottsylvania, North Anna, and Cold Har- 
bor were in the works sleeping, gaining strength 
to repulse our assault, while their pickets watch- 
ed for them. 

No one has ever accused General Hancock 
of lying. 

It was broad daylight. I had eaten my 



164 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE. 

breakfast and was looking over the field of 
yesterday's fighting. Some dead men lay on 
the ground ; but the scarcity of those in gray 
plainly showed that they had no stomach for 
fighting, that they were raw, undisciplined 
militia, who had abandoned their powerful line 
of earthworks when attacked by a few black 
troops. At sixty feet in front of the captured 
works I saw pine trees which had been struck 
with Confederate bullets thirty feet from the 
ground. This told, better than words, the 
nervous condition of the men who pretended 
to defend the line. 

Wandering toward the rear, I came on the 
line of rifle-pits which had been used by the 
Confederate pickets, and saw two dead men 
lying close together. I walked over to them. 
One was a burly negro sergeant, as black as 
coal, in blue ; the other was a Confederate line 
sergeant, in gray. Their bayoneted rifles lay 
beside them. Curious at the nearness of the 
bodies, I turned them over and looked care- 
fully at them. They had met with unloaded 
rifles and had fought a duel with their bayonets, 
each stabbing the other to death. 

The battery bugler blew " boots and sad- 
dles ! " and I hastened back to my gun, to hear 



FIGHTING AROUND PETERSBURG. 1 65 

that the other corps of the Potomac Army had 
arrived, and that the infantry would make a 
general assault that day, probably in the after- 
noon. We limbered up ; then marched to the 
left and took a new position on a bit of level 
land which gradually sloped toward a creek 
which flowed between us and the silent Confed- 
erate line. The preliminary artillery practice 
began, so as to announce in thunder tones that 
we were getting ready to make an assault. I 
worked listlessly to and fro from the muzzle of 
my three-inch gun, carelessly looking ahead to 
see if the fire produced any result. It did not. 
The gunners of the Confederate batteries were 
evidently husbanding their ammunition. They 
treated us with silent contempt. But, unable 
to withstand our steady hammering, they at 
last coldly responded to our attentions. Shot 
skipped by us, shell exploded among us ; but, 
with very unusual luck, we lost but few men. 

We fired steadily. The limber of the gun 
was emptied. It went back to the line of 
caissons to be filled and the limber of the cais- 
sons came up. Soon the operation was re- 
peated and I knew that the caissons would 
speedily go to the rear after ammunition. After 
a little while the first sergeant came to me and 



l66 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE, 

said : '* You seem to be tired. Go to the rear 
with the caissons after ammunition." I handed 
the heavy sponge staff to another cannoneer 
and walked to the caissons. Mounting on the 
empty chests I rode to the rear where the 
ammunition wagons were parked. A portion 
of the road we travelled over ran within three 
fourths of a mile of a heavy Confederate re- 
doubt, out of whose embrasures the muzzles of 
large black guns were thrust. To the right of 
this piece of road was an open field of thin, 
poverty-creating soil ; beyond the field was 
a forest. Thickly scattered among the trees, 
and grouped at the edge of the open field, in 
the shade, were those cowards, the ** coffee 
boilers." Gangs of officers* servants and many 
refugee negroes were there. Pack-mules loaded 
with pots, frying-pans, gripsacks, and bags of 
clothing stood tied to trees. White-capped 
army wagons, with six mules harnessed to them, 
stood at the edge of the woods. The drivers 
of these wagons were drinking coffee with 
friendly " boilers," and they were probably 
frightening one another by telling blood-curd- 
ling tales of desperate but mythical battles 
they had been engaged in. Fires were burning 
brightly in the forest, and thin columns of 



FIGHTING AROUND PETERSBURG. 1 67 

smoke arose above the trees. I could almost 
smell the freshly made Rio and the broiled 
bacon. It was as though a huge pic-nic were 
going on in the woods. The scene angered 
me. I knew that the *' coffee boilers " were 
almost to a man bounty-jumping cowards, and 
I wanted that camp broken up. 

The Confederates in the redoubt allowed us 
to pass to the rear without firing on us ; for we 
were empty and not worth powder and shot. 
Arriving at the park of the ammunition train 
we filled our ammunition chests, and then be- 
gan the return march. When the full caissons 
came out of the woods on to the portion of the 
road which was exposed to the fire from the 
fort, I saw the Confederate gunners spring to 
their cannon. I looked at the camp of the 
'' coffee boilers." They were enjoying life. I 
leaned forward and clasped my knees with ex- 
cess of joy as I realized what was about to 
occur. The Confederate gunners were going 
to try to blow up our caissons. I was confident 
that they could not hit us, and was also confi- 
dent that their attempt would bloodily disturb 
the camp of the "boilers" and hangers-on. We 
broke into a trot, then into a gallop, and then 
into a dead run. Clouds of smoke shot forth 



1 68 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE. 

from the redoubt, and out of these, large black 
balls rose upward and rushed through the air, 
and passed, shrieking shrilly, close above us, 
to descend in the camp of the *' boilers." It 
was a delightful scene. I hugged my knees and 
rocked to and fro and laughed until my flesh- 
less ribs were sore. Shells swept above me and 
burst in the woods. Shot howled past and cut 
large trees down, and they fell with a crash 
among the frying-pans and coffee-pots. Team- 
sters sprang into their wagons, or on to their 
saddle-mules, and savagely plied their whips 
and hastened away from the pasture-field. 
Negro servants loosened their pack-mules and 
hung on to the loads of tinware as they, yelling 
at the top of their voices, ran for the rear. 
Men, clad and armed as soldiers, skurried as 
frightened rabbits, hid in holes, lay prone on 
the earth, dropped behind logs. Through the 
dust and smoke and uproar I saw men fall, 
saw others mangled by chunks of shell, and saw 
one, struck fairly by an exploding shell, vanish. 
Enormously pleased, I hugged my lean legs, 
and laughed and laughed again. It was the 
most refreshing sight I had seen for weeks. 
Our caissons, each drawn by six galloping 
horses, passed safely through the fire and 



FIGHTING AROUND PETERSBURG, 1 69 

entered the protective woods, and, moving 
rapidly across the blood-chilling belt where the 
spent balls fall and the wounded lie, were soon 
on the battle line, and I was again engaged 
in helping to waste good powder and shot and 
shell. 

The afternoon passed quickly away. One of 
the caissons, which belonged to a battery that 
was in action alongside of us, struck by a shell, 
blew up, and two men were blown up with it. 
A long bolt made by our English brothers, did 
this work, and it added to my dislike of all 
things English. As the sun sank the infantry 
prepared to deliver the assault that we had 
been announcing as to be made. A staff officer 
rode up ; we ceased firing. The smoke drifted 
off of the field. Utterly exhausted, I threw 
myself on the hot ground and watched the 
doomed men who were to try to carry the Con- 
federate line. The charging cheer rang out 
loudly, the line of blue-clad soldiers rushed 
forward, the Confederate pickets emptied their 
rifles, jumped from their rifle-pits, and ran for 
their main line, which was still silent excepting 
the artillery. This was served rapidly, but not 
very effectively. The line of blue swept on in 
good order, cheering loudly and continuously. 



170 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE, 

They drew near to the Confederate earth- 
works. Canister cut gaps in the ranks. Then 
the heads of Lee's infantry rose above their in- 
trenchments. I saw the glint of the sun on 
their poHshed rifle barrels. A cloud of smoke 
curled along the works. Our men began to 
tumble in large numbers ; some fell forward, 
others backward, others staggered a few steps 
and then sank down as though to rest. Still I 
did not hear the roll of the musketry. Suddenly 
it burst on me, mingled with the fierce Con- 
federate battle-cry. The field grew hazy with 
smoke. Rifles were tossed high in the air. 
Battle flags went down with a sweep, to again 
appear and plunge into the smoke. Wounded 
men straggled out of the battle. Fresh troops 
hurried by the battery and disappeared in the 
hazy smoke. Away off to our right I heard the 
charging cheer of our soldiers and the thunder- 
ous roll of musketry; to the left more musketry 
and exultant howls, as though we had met with 
success. In our front the fire grew steadily 
fiercer and fiercer. The wounded men, who 
drifted through the battery, told us that the 
works were very strong, and that beyond them 
there was another and still stronger line, and 
that our troops were fighting in the open before 



FIGHTING AROUND PETERSBURG. I /I 

the front line and were not meeting with any 
success. Night settled down, and the fight 
still went on ; but it fagged. The musketry 
was no longer a steady roar, and we could see 
the flashes of the rifles, and the Confederate 
parapet glowing redly. At points the musketry 
fire broke out fiercely, then died down. In our 
front the fight was over. My battery moved 
forward under the direction of a staff officer, 
and we threw up an earthwork. 

That night the news gatherers walked the 
battle lines. They told us that the assault had 
been bloodily repulsed excepting at one or two 
unimportant points. And they also brought 
an exceedingly interesting bit of news or gossip, 
era camp rumor. They said : '' We have heard 
from some of Butler's men that in the breast 
pocket of the coat of a Confederate officer, who 
was killed in front of their lines at Bermuda 
Hundreds on June 1 5th, was found the 'morning 
report ' of the Confederate army which was de- 
fending Petersburg on that day, and that this 
report showed that Beauregard did not have 
over 10,000 men, most of whom were militia, 
with which to defend Petersburg, and that But- 
ler had laid this report before Baldy Smith and 
Hancock, and had urged them to make the as- 



1/2 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE. 

sault and capture Petersburg before the Army 
of Northern Virginia came up ; but that they, 
Smith and Hancock, had hesitated and daw- 
dled the night away." 

In the morning I saw that there had been 
some advance of the line. The Second Corps 
had gained a little ground at great cost, and we 
heard that Burnside had also gained ground 
and captured a redoubt. The dead soldiers of 
the Second Corps lay thickly in front of us, 
placed in long trenches by their comrades. 

That afternoon the battery quartermaster- 
sergeant, goaded to desperation by the taunts 
of the artillery privates, nerved himself with 
whiskey and came to the battery to display his 
courage. The Confederate sharp-shooters had 
attacked us about noon, and our works were 
hot. I, snugly seated under the earthworks, 
looked at this representative of the staff with 
all the intense dislike privates have for the gold- 
laced ofificers. I was wicked enough to wish 
that he would get shot. He swaggered up 
and down behind the guns, talking loudly, and 
ignorant of the danger. I, with high-beating 
heart, looked eagerly at him, hungrily waiting 
for him to jump and howl. I was disappointed. 
A sharp-shooter's bullet struck him on the 



FIGHTING AROUND PETERSBURG. 173 

throat It crashed through his spine at the 
base of the brain, and he neither jumped nor 
howled-simply fell on his back dead. 

Early on the morning of June i8th, some o 
our pickets brought word to the battery that 
the Confederates had abandoned their front hne 
during the night, and that they had moved 
back to their interior line, which w^^/horter 
and stronger and more easily defended. The 
infantry soldiers moved forward, and occupied 
the works they had been unable to capture 
My battery moved to another position, and 
a/ain the guns opened on the Confederate hne, 
and again they husbanded their ammunition 
But their sharp-shooters fairly made us howl 
with anguish. I heartily wished that Lee had 
not abandoned his front line. Our infantry 
moved to and fro, getting ready to assault the 
new line of intrenchments. The soldiers were 
thoroughly discouraged. They had no heart 
for the assault. It was evident that they had 
determined not to fight stanchly, not to at- 
tempt to accomplish the impossible. At about 
four o'clock in the afternoon the infantry was 
sent to the slaughter, and the Confederates 
promptly killed a sufficient number of them to 
Ltisfy our generals that the works could not 



174 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE. 

be taken by assaults delivered by exhausted 
and discouraged troops. In many places our 
battle line did not advance to the line of rifle- 
pits held by the Confederate pickets. We had 
lost about 12,000 men in the attempts to cap- 
ture Petersburg. The Second Corps could 
have taken the city on the night of June 15th 
without losing more than 500 men. This fact 
disheartened the enlisted men of the Army of 
the Potomac. They were supremely disgusted 
with the display of military stupidity our gen- 
erals had made. 

We marched somewhere at night. The road 
was lined with sleeping infantry. I was hungry. 
As I look back at those bloody days it seem's to 
me that I was always hungry. Men to the right 
of us, to the left of us, lay as though dead— they 
slept so soundly; but their haversacks were not 
in sight. They were veterans who knew enough 
to hide their haversacks when they slept on 
roads. We came to a heavy double line of 
men, who looked as if they had opened ranks 
and then fallen over asleep. Soon we light- 
artillery men recognized them as loo-day men 
from Ohio. Their haversacks stood at their 
heads. Wickedly we all went to plundering 
the joo-day men as they slept. We exchanged 



FIGHTING AROUND PETERSBURG, 175 

our empty haversacks for full ones, and every 
man of us had a spare haversack filled with 
food hanging on the guns or caissons. At the 
time I thought it a capital joke on the Ohio 
men ; but I now think that some of those men 
were'very hungry before they got any thing to 
eat. They must have bitter recollections of 
the night march of some of the Second Corps' 

artillery. 

In the morning we marched over ground 
where there had been fighting the evening be- 
fore. Sitting at the base of a pine tree I saw 
a line sergeant. His face was stained with 
blood, which had oozed from under a bandage 
made of an old shirt sleeve, tightly bound 
around his eyes. By his side sat a little drum- 
mer boy, with unstrung drum and the sticks 
put up standing on the ground before him. 
The muscular form of the sergeant was bent 
forward, his chin resting on his hands, his elbows 
on his knees. His figure conveyed to me the 
impression of utter hopelessness. The small 
drummer looked up the road, and then down 
the road, with anxious gaze. I stopped for an 
instant, and asked, ''What is the matter?" 
The drummer looked up at me, his blue eyes 
filled with tears, and answered: "He's my 



1/6 RECOLLECTIOXS OF A PRIVATE. 

father. Both his eyes were bhnded on the 
picket line this morning. I am waiting for an 
ambulance to come along. I don't know where 
the field hospitals are." I hurriedly pointed in 
the direction of some field hospitals we had 
passed a few hundred yards back. The two 
rose up and walked slowly off, the son leading 
his blinded father by the hand, leading him to 
the operating-table, and I hastened on, swallow- 
ing my tears and cursing the delay to take 
Petersburg. 

Some stragglers, bearing the red cross on 
their caps, were passed, and we were satisfied 
that we were not merely changing position, 
but that we were on the flanking move again. 
We got into a thickly wooded country, and, 
without a particle of warning, the men in gray 
burst from cover and were on us. There was 
some exceedingly severe fighting here, and we 
got decidedly the worst of it, being driven 
back beyond the Jerusalem plank-road in great 
disorder. A group of artillerymen, some of 
them wounded, came down the line and dropped 
into our battery. They told us that their bat- 
tery had been captured, and that the infantry 
who fought near their guns had lost severely, 
many prisoners being taken by the Confeder- 



FIGHTING AROUND PETERSBURG. ^77 

ates ; but that when they left, our troops were 
holding their ground, and had connected with 
.the Sixth Corps. We held the ground we were 
fighting on, slept on it, and the next morning 
again pushed on in column, to be again savagely 
attacked on our flank by heavy masses of Con- 
federate infantry in column. Again we were 
roughly handled, losing more guns and many 
prisoners. The country was so densely wooded 
that I could see but little of this fighting. I 
simply served my gun, and looked ahead into 
the forest, expecting to be hit by a rifle-ball at 
any instant. Next morning we pushed on 
again, having driven the Confederates off during 
the night, and soon reached the Weldon Rail- 
road. There we got soundly thrashed and 
gladly retreated, having lost more guns and 
many more prisoners. 

I talked to some rebel prisoners and swapped 
food for tobacco. They told me that it was 
Hill's Corps which had been so persistently 
attentive to us. They were incHned to boast 
about one of their corps handling two of our 
crack corps. In truth they had torn us badly. 
One long-legged, dangling Cracker, with a broad, 
derisive grin on his face, which displayed his 
lono- tobacco-stained teeth, said to me, drawl- 



17^ J^ECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE. 

ingly : '' Say, sonny, did you clover-leaf chaps 
get a bellyful?" I assured him we had room 
for more, whereat he grinned and marched to 
the rear with his comrades. 

I had had enough of marching and fighting- 
enough of seeing good men's lives squandered 
in assaults against earthworks. The continuous 
strain was greater than the soldiers, poorly fed 
and exposed to the weather (the enlisted men 
had no tents during this bloody and wasteful 
campaign), could bear. As I have said, I got 
heartsick and weary of the fighting, and believed 
that Grant could not capture Petersburg until 
he had disciplined his army, which would take 
months, as by far the larger portion of the 
troops were new to the field, and were bounty- 
paid recruits. About ;o,ooo of the good men 
we had crossed the Rapidan with lay dead be- 
hind us, or were in hospitals, or languished in 
Confederate military prisons. So I, one morn- 
ing, claimed my discharge, which had been 
ordered by Secretary of War Stanton while we 
were fighting in front of Cold Harbor. Getting 
it, I went to Washington, where a commission 
in the Fourth United States Artillery awaited 
me. 



X. 



CONDITION OF THE ARMY OF THE POTOMAC 
AFTER PETERSBURG. 

THE memories of the war are growing dim. 
The ranks of the men who carried arms 
through Grant's last campaign are being thinned 
rapidly by death. In a few years all of us will 
join our comrades who fell dead along the 
bloody trail that led from the Wilderness thick- 
ets to the fair fields that surrounded the be- 
leaguered cities of Petersburg and Richmond. 
If a truthful statement is to be made of the 
Army of the Potomac, of its morale, when the 
enlisted men sank exhausted into their trenches 
before Petersburg, it must be made quickly or 
not at all. I write this chapter after much con- 
sideration, and I write it solely in the interests 
of truth and to put permanently on record, so 
that future generations of Americans can read it, 
the opinions of many intelligent men who fought 
in the ranks throughout that bloody campaign. 
Late in the afternoon of June i8, 1864, and 

179 



l8o RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE. 

while the battery to which I belonged was 
actively shelling a Confederate earthwork, and 
getting shelled in return, a brigade of infantry 
passed close behind our guns. I was sick with 
a coming fever. I had exhausted my strength 
in the morning, and was serving at the caissons 
during the afternoon. The brigade of infantry 
passed within five yards of me. The infantry 
were weak and looked tired. Their steps were 
slow. The appearance of these troops attrac- 
ted my attention. I saw that they were veter- 
ans, and greatly superior to the motley crew 
into which the Army of the Potomac had de- 
generated. The brigade was about 500 mus- 
kets strong. I spoke to one of the men, asking 
what command it was, and he answered, whether 
truthfully or not I cannot say, " The Excelsior 
Brigade of the Second Corps." That brigade 
was a fighting brigade, justly famed throughout 
the Army of the Potomac for their desperate 
valor. It was the peer of the famous brigades 
from Vermont and New Hampshire. 

*' Going in to the charge, men ? " I asked. 

Nine or ten of the tired infantry soldiers 
heard the question, and they growled out an ex- 
planatory answer in tones that expressed the 
most profound disgust : 



AJ^MV OF THE POTOMAC. l8l 

" No, we are not going to charge. We are go- 
ing to run towards the Confederate earthworks, 
and then we are going to run back. We have 
had enough of assaulting earthworks. We are 
hungry and tired, and we want to rest and to 

eat." 

I spoke to other men farther down the short 
column, and, in effect, received the same answer. 
I went to the rear after ammunition that after- 
noon, and I met other troops going to the 
front. I spoke to many of these men, and all 
I spoke to were resolute in their purpose not 
to make a determined charge of the Confeder- 
ate intrenchments. And they did not. 

At the time, in the latter part of June, 1864, 
it was freely charged by the generals employed 
in the Army of the Potomac that the army 
was not fighting as stanchly at Petersburg as it 
had fought in the Wilderness or at Spottsyl- 
vania. The charge was true. But was it the 
enlisted men alone who shrank from the bloody 
work of assaulting earthworks behind which 
the clear-eyed, nervy, veteran Confederate in- 
fantry lurked ? Let the figures, presumably 
official, as published in the work entitled 
'' Grant and his Campaigns," speak in answer, 
and it must be borne in mind that these figures 



I82 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVA TE. 

were never accepted by the enlisted men as 
truthfully representing their losses during the 
campaign. We had seen regiments melt be- 
fore the heat of the Confederate fire, until 
a scant hundred men fell into line when the 
drum tapped. We had seen brigades fall into 
battle line three hundred muskets strong. Once 
at Cold Harbor two regiments were sent to 
support my battery. I smiled sorrowfully at 
the scanty array. One hundred and twenty 
muskets, sixty files, were all that were left of 
two Delaware regiments. We had seen heavy- 
artillery regiments, which joined us at Spottsyl- 
vania, 1,500, 1,600, 1,700 men strong, fall into 
line before Petersburg 400, 500, 600 men 
strong, and to come back from the assault de- 
hvered on June 18, 1864, still weaker. The 
enlisted men who passed unharmed through the 
frightful carnage, judged the losses the army 
suffered by the actual losses that had occurred 
in reginients with which we were familiar. 

To the official figures. During May, 1864, 
which period of time includes the prolonged 
study of Confederate intrenchments at North 
Anna, the Army of the Potomac lost 395 
officers killed, 1,343 wounded, and 211 missing. 
Five or six general officers were killed and ten 



ARMY OF THE POTOMAC. 183 

or twelve wounded during the month. In the 
same month 5.189 enUsted men were killed, 
27,140 wounded, and 7,239 were missmg. From 
May 31st to Oct. 28th, the day on which the ^ 
campaign practically ended, in the Potomac 
Army 401 officers were killed, i,453 wounded, 
and 564 missing; during the same time 4,58/ 
enlisted men were killed, 24,110 were wounded, 
and 15,844 were missing. The aggregate losses 
after the fighting at North Anna were 46,989 
enlisted men and officers. And the enlisted 
men never heard of but one general officer 
being killed. He was Brigadier-General Burn- 
ham! They heard of three or four other gen- 
. erals being wounded, and of two being cap- 
tured. During this same time— that is, after 
the battle of North Anna— we learned from 
prisoners that the Confederate Generals Doles, 
Chambliss, Gherardio, Dunnovan, and Gregg 
had been killed, and many of their generals 
wounded. And it must be remembered that 
the Confederate generals were behind shelter- 
ing earthworks with their troops. The execu- 
tion of their duty made it essential that they 
should be there. Our losses of general officers, 
if they had fearlessly performed their duty, 
should have been at least four times as heavy 



184 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE. 

as those of the Confederates. Instead of one 
Union general being killed to over 44,000 en- 
listed men stricken in battle, there should have 
been at least twenty of them killed and eighty 
of them wounded, and there probably would 
have been if they had done their duty as reck- 
lessly as the Confederate generals did theirs. 
Let me go west, and to the battle of Franklin, 
to illustrate my meaning. On the afternoon of 
November 30, 1864, the Confederate generals 
led their veteran infantry to the assault against 
the hastily constructed Union earthworks, 
thrown up across a broad neck of land formed 
by a bend in the Harpeth River, in Tennessee. 
The attack began at 4 P.M. It was dark at 6 
P.M. The fight lasted until about 10 P.M. Say 
six hours of fighting, four of which were per- 
formed after dark, when it was impossible for 
infantry to select generals as targets, or to shoot 
accurately. The Confederates lost about 6,000 
enlisted men in this action, and four Confeder- 
ate generals were killed and six so severely 
wounded that they left the front. In truth, 
every general in the Confederate army which 
fought at Franklin, excepting General Hood, 
was either killed or wounded. So fought the 
Confederate leaders in the field. So Southern 



ARMY OF THE POTOMAC. 1S5 

generals led their soldiers to death and shared 

it with them. . 

It is true the regulars, typified by Major- 
General Griffin of the Fifth Corps, and volun- 
teers by Major-General Francis C. Barlow of 
the Second Corps, commanded the universal 
respect of the enlisted men. We knew the 
fighting generals and we respected them, and 
we knew the cowards and despised them. 

It was frequently and truthfully asserted that 
the Army of the Potomac did not fight as 
steadily and persistently around Petersburg as 
it had done in the Wilderness and around 
Spottsylvania. In other words, that the great 
army had become demoralized. I believe that 
the demoralization of the Army of the Potomac 
was due to two causes, which were at that time 
fully understood by all the intelligent volun- 
teers in the army. The first and minor cause 
was the shirking of bloody work by some of the 
generals, which disheartened the enlisted men 
and imbittered them. 

The second and potent cause of the demorali- 
zation of the Army of the Potomac was the 
worthless character of the recruits who were 
supplied to the army in 1864-65, In 1864 
requisitions calling for 500,000 troops were 



1 86 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE, 

made on the North. " So thoroughly exhausted 
was the breed of fighting men in the North 
that but 169,000 of the enormous number of 
men raised by purchase ever stood in battle 
ranks, and they stood there because they had 
been unable to elude the vigilance or corrupt 
the honesty of the guards who accompanied 
them from the recruiting barracks to the front. 
Since man has been on earth the race has been 
divided into classes, one of which is the crimi- 
nal class. This class live by plundering the 
producing class. They live by theft, by mur- 
der, by cheating, by pandering to the ignoble 
vices of men. When the Northern townships 
began to pay bounties for recruits to fill the 
quotas allotted to them, the criminal class of 
America quit preying on society at large, and 
turned their attention to swindling the govern- 
ment. They accepted the bounty offered by 
the towns and enlisted. When the bounties 
were paid to them they deserted and enlisted 
in another town, to again desert. Bounty- 
jumping was the safest and most profitable 
business in the United States during those 
days. The boldest and most intelligent of the 
criminal class never appeared at the front. 
They escaped. The weak, the diseased, the 



ARMY OF THE POTOMAC. 1 8/ 

feeble-minded joined the army. They were 
the scum of the slums of the great European 
and American cities. To these were added the 
raklngs of rural almshouses and the never-do- 
wells of villages. The 'recruits were faint- 
hearted and stupid. Many were irreclaimable 
blackguards, wholly given over to numerous 
ignoble and unnamable vices. They were 
moral lepers. They were conscienceless, cow- 
ardly scoundrels, and the clean-minded Ameri- 
can and Irish and German volunteers would 
not associate with them. 

Directly after the battle of Cold Harbor these 
pretended soldiers began to be noticeable in the 
Army of the Potomac. They were not the 
heavy-artillery men drawn by Grant from 
Washington to make good his losses. We had 
no better troops than those. But these men 
were the bounty-paid substitutes. They were 
the white slaves, whom greedy and unpatriotic 
men, who preyed on the necessities of timid 
communities, gathered from the slums, from 
Castle Garden, from the almshouses, from the 
cots of venereal hospitals, from the bars of 
criminal courts, from prison cells, and from the 
unnatural parents of weak-minded sons. After 
gathering the foul creatures, they kept them in 



l88 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE. 

pens and private prisons. Over the doors of 
these dens swung signs, and blazoned on 
them in gilt letters were shameful legends 
which announced that within a man dealt in 
alleged men, and that the honor of townships 
could be pawned there. A Mississippi slave- 
dealer was a refined and honorable gentleman 
in comparison with a Northern bounty-broker, 
who sold men to the townships which filled 
their quotas by purchase. I have seen these 
substitutes, many of them unable to speak 
English, vermin infested, rough-skinned, stink- 
ing with disease, their eyes running matter, 
their legs and arms thin and feeble, their backs 
bowed, and their rat-like and idiot-like heads 
hanging low, join the army to be virtually 
kicked out of the decent commands they were 
billeted on. They were scorned, kicked, and 
cursed by the volunteers as mangy curs. These 
degraded men formed the '' coffee boilers." 

I first saw systematic '' coffee boiling," a sure 
sign that discipline was relaxed, at Cold Har- 
bor. In the woods to the rear and right of my 
battery, groups of unwounded men cooked and 
boiled coffee. These men had dropped out of 
their commands as they approached the battle 
line, and had hidden in the woods. There 



ARMY OF THE POTOMAC, 1S9 

were hundreds of them in the army at Cold 
Harbor. There were hundreds of them around 
Petersburg. They sneaked away from their 
regiments during battle, or while marching to 
battle, to rejoin them when on the march. 
They were always present when rations were is- 
sued. They were never present when cartridges 
were' supplied. They were, without exception, 
thieves. They robbed the dead. They stole 
from the living. They were strongly suspected 
of killing wounded men at night. More cow- 
ardly creatures were never clad in the uniform 
of English-speaking peoples. They plundered 
houses. They frightened women and little 
children. They burned dwellings. To call a 
soldier of the Army of the Potomac a '' coffee 
boiler " was an insult to be promptly resented. 
These worthless creatures weakened every 
battle line they were forced into. No matter 
how brave a veteran soldier' may be, he relies 
on the men on either side of him to stand there 
until they fall. He relies on them to accom- 
pany him in the advance, and to be by his side 
when slowly falling back before a superior force. 
It is essential that a soldier hears the voices of 
his comrades when he is charging. He must 
know that his comrades are as stanch fighters 



190 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE, 

as he. Then he can fight with comparative 
comfort. How was it with the larger portions 
of the bounty-paid recruits raised in 1864? It 
did not lie within the power of any regimental 
officers to hold these undisciplined blackguards 
steady under fire. Dozens of times I have 
seen them break and run, throwing away their 
arms as they fled, yelling, to the rear and to 
their coffee-pots. They weakened the battle 
lines, as no man can fight when surrounded by 
cowards, who are easily panic-stricken, and who 
are unrestrained by any consideration of pride 
from ignominiously running away to save their 
hves. No man really enjoys a battle. One 
has to string up his nerves and take a firm grip 
on himself morally, and hold himself in the 
battle flames for a few moments until warmed 
to passion. The impulse is to run out of the 
danger. The men the bounty-brokers supplied 
to the army had no morality, no sentiment 
except of fear, and they could not and would 
not stand fire. They desired to live to enjoy 
the spending of the money they had received. 
So they shirked, and ran, and boiled coffee in 
the rear until gathered up by the provost 
guards and sent to their regiments. They were 
disciplined somewhat during the winter of 



ARMY OF THE POTOMAC. IQ^ 

1864-65. Previous to the spring of 1865 the 
larger portion of the bounty-paid recruits would 
not have been worth burning Confederate pow- 
der to kill, as their presence in our ranks im- 
paired the efificiency of our army. They could 
have been safely killed with clubs. 

After the battle of June 18, 1864, the enlisted 
men frequently discussed the condition of the 
Army of the Potomac. They sat o' nights in 
groups behind the intrenchments and talked, 
talked, talked of the disintegrating force which 
Grant commanded. Enormous losses of prison- 
ers were reported, losses that were incurred while 
charging earthworks, which fact clearly showed 
that our troops had surrendered after reaching 
the Confederate intrenchments — surrendered 
rather than attempt to take them or to return 
to our line under the deadly accurate fire of the 
Confederate infantry. Many of the volunteers 
vehemently asserted that the bounty-paid re- 
cruits really deserted during action to seek 
safety in Confederate prison pens. The en- 
listed men who had gathered into ranks under 
McClellan, and who had been forged into 
soldiers by that admirable drill-master, all said 
that the Army of the Potomac of 1862 was far 
superior, man to man, to that which crossed 



192 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE. 

the Rapidan in May of 1864, and immeasur- 
ably superior to the army which lay in the 
trenches before Petersburg in July of 1864. 
They also asserted, and truthfully, that if the 
original volunteers, or men as good as they 
were, were commanded by Grant he would 
capture Richmond in twenty-four hours. The 
enlisted men spent much time in comparing 
Grant with McClellan. The latter had many 
warm friends among the soldiers. He only of 
all the men who had commanded the Army of 
the Potomac was personally liked and admired 
by his troops. Soldiers' eyes would brighten 
when they talked of him. Their hard, lean, 
browned faces would soften and light up with 
affection when they spoke of him,— and still it 
was affection only; they did not, as a rule, con- 
cede to him military talent. And the general 
opinion among them was ; given Grant in com- 
mand of the army in 1862, and the rebellion 
would have been crushed that year. Asked 
how McClellan would have done with the army 
of 1864 under his command, they shrugged 
their shoulders and said dryly : *' Well, he 
would have ended the war in the Wilderness— 
by establishing the Confederacy." 

One night as we sat around the guns talking 



AI^MY OF THE POTOMAC. 1 93 

with visitors from a New Hampshire regiment, 
a private, young in years, but old in service, 

said : 

'' McClellan expected American volunteers to 
fight day after day. Outfought and beaten to- 
day they must f^ght to-morrow as though ever 
victorious, and they did it when he commanded 
them. He taught us to fight, and all that is 
good in this many-tongued crew of Grant's, the 
leaven of it, is the remnant of McClellan's army. 
Grant has not moulded one man in this vast 
mob. He has filled our ranks as best he could, 
but he depends on the men who sprang to arms 
when the Northern war-drum sounded, to sup- 
ply these bounty-jumping recruits with courage 
and to teach them their duty. Take the volun- 
teers away from the Army of the Potomac, and 
Lee could drown the rest of this army in the 
James River without firing a shot." 

'^ Drown them! " exclaimed a young soldier 
who was raised on the shores of Sunapee Lake 
in New Hampshire. ''Drown them! Curse 
them! I am afraid to fight with any of 
them standing by my side. There is a man 
from Manchester, who was paid $i,ooo for en- 
listing, whose place in line is next to me. It 
keeps me busy to hold him from running away 



194 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE. 

whenever we are under fire. Some day he will 
be so badly frightened that he will run toward 
the Confederates instead of away from them, 
and then I am going to kill him. If ever he 
gets a little ahead of me, so that I can safely 
kill him, I will gather him in." No one seemed 
to be shocked at his intention. ** Drown 
them ? " he scornfully repeated ; " Lee's vet- 
erans drown them ? Yes, they could push 
them into the James River with pine poles, 
and as they sank they would howl for mercy 
in twenty-seven languages. See here, men," he 
added, impressively, " if Grant ever intends to 
take yonder earthworks," jerking his thumb 
over his shoulder to indicate the Confederate 
lines, '' he has got to give these bounty-jumpers 
about six months of steady drilling, six months 
of severe discipline, six months of punishment 
and savage abuse. They have got to be pound- 
ed and hammered until they are in abject fear 
of their line officers and are taught that to 
shrink means death. If Grant gives them that, 
they can be made to fight next spring. Good 
God, men ! " he exclaimed, ** I was sent to City 
Point the other day, and I passed a short column 
of troops who were moving to the front, and I 
saw dozens of the men fall out and endeavor 



ARMY OF THE POTOMAC. 1 95 

to hide In the brush and woods. Behind the 
column came a detachment of the provost 
guards, and these soldiers had to pick up and 
head off and surround the abject wretches who 
sought to hide long before they were within 
sight of the line of fire. They were panic- 
stricken at the prospect of fighting. They 
had to be prodded with bayonets to make 
them follow the column. Things have come 
to a pretty pass in this army if a column of 
troops cannot be moved from one camp to an- 
other without being herded as sheep driven 
along a highway ! American volunteers ! " he 
scornfully exclaimed ; " American volunteers, 
and marched to camp or to battle under provost 
guards ! They are not Americans, they are not 
volunteers : they are the offscouring of Europe. 
They disgrace our uniform." Here his scorn 
overcame him. He spat on the ground, arose 
and disappeared in the forest with a yell of dis- 
gust. And I knew that every word he had 
uttered was true. 

Throughout the latter portion of the cam- 
paign the enlisted men, the volunteers, com- 
plained bitterly of the lack of judgment dis- 
played by some of the commanding officers, 
and as freely as I talked with my comrades, as 



196 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE. 

dirty, vermin-infested, and hungry we sat be- 
hind our earthworks, so freely do I claim the 
right to write now. I have faithfully endeav- 
ored to tell how the enlisted men, who put down 
the slaveholders' rebellion, felt and talked and 
lived in hopes long deferred and never fulfilled, 
of the coming of a great commander whose 
military talent would command our unquali- 
fied respect. He never came. 



XI. 

HOW MEN DIE IN BATTLE. 

ALMOST every death on the battle-field is 
different. And the manner of the death 
depends on the wound and on the man, whether 
he is cowardly or brave, whether his vitality is 
large or small, whether he is a man of active 
imagination or is dull of intellect, whether he 
is of nervous or lymphatic temperament. I 
instance deaths and wounds that I saw in 
Grant's last campaign. 

On the second day of the battle of the Wil- 
derness, where I fought as an infantry soldier, 
I saw more men killed and wounded than I did 
before or after in the same time. I knew but 
few of the men in the regiment in whose ranks 
I stood ; but I learned the Christian names of 
some of them. The man who stood next to 
me on my right was called Will. He was cool, 
brave, and intelligent. In the morning, when 
the Second Corps was advancing and driving 
Hill's soldiers slowly back, I was flurried. He 

197 



198 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE. 

noticed it, and steadied my nerves by saying, 
kindly : '' Don't fire so fast. This fight will 
last all day. Don't hurry. Cover your man 
before you pull your trigger. Take it easy, 
my boy, take it easy, and your cartridges will 
last the longer." This man fought effectively. 
During the day I had learned to look up to this 
excellent soldier, and lean on him. Toward 
evening, as we were being slowly driven back 
to the Brock Road by Longstreet's men, we 
made a stand. I was behind a tree firing, with 
my rifle barrel resting on the stub of a limb. 
Will was standing by my side, but in the open. 
He, with a groan, doubled up and dropped on 
the ground at my feet. He looked up at me. 
His face was pale. He gasped for breath a few 
times, and then said, faintly : *' That ends me. 
I am shot through the bowels." I said : " Crawl 
to the rear. We are not far from the intrench- 
ments along the Brock Road." I saw him sit 
up, and indistinctly saw him reach for his rifle, 
which had fallen from his hands as he fell. 
Again I spoke to him, urging him to go to the 
rear. He looked at me and said impatiently: 
" I tell you that I am as good as dead. There 
is no use in fooling with me. I shall stay here." 
Then he pitched forward dead, shot again and 



HO W MEN DIE IN BA TTLE. 1 99 

through the head. We fell back before Long- 
street's soldiers and left Will lying in a windrow 
of dead men. 

When we got into the Brock Road intrench- 
ments, a man a few files to my left dropped 
dead, shot just above the right eye. He did 
not groan, or sigh, or make the slightest physical 
movement, except that his chest heaved a few 
times. The life went out of his face instantly, 
leaving it without a particle of expression. It 
was plastic, and, as the facial muscles con- 
tracted, it took many shapes. When this 
man's body became cold, and his face hard- 
ened, it was horribly distorted, as though he 
had suffered intensely. Any person who had 
not seen him killed, would have said that he 
had endured supreme agony before death re- 
leased him. A few minutes after he fell, an- 
other man, a little farther to the left, fell with 
apparently a precisely similar wound. He was 
straightened out and lived for over an hour. 
He did not speak. Simply lay on his back, and 
his broad chest rose and fell, slowly at first, 
and then faster and faster, and more and more 
feebly, until he was dead. And his face hard- 
ened, and it was almost terrifying in its painful 
distortion. I have seen dead soldiers' faces 



200 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVA TE. 

which were wreathed in smiles, and heard their 
comrades say that they had died happy. I do 
not beHeve that the face of a dead soldier, lying 
on a battle-field, ever truthfully indicates the 
mental or physical anguish, or peacefulness of 
mind, which he suffered or enjoyed before his 
death. The face is plastic after death, and as 
the facial muscles cool and contract, they draw 
the face into many shapes. Sometimes the 
dead smile, again they stare with glassy eyes, 
and lolling tongues, and dreadfully distorted 
visages at you. It goes for nothing. One death 
was as painless as the other. 

After Longstreet's soldiers had driven the 
Second Corps into their intrenchments along 
the Brock Road, a battle-exhausted infantry- 
man stood behind a large oak tree. His back 
rested against it. He was very tired, and held 
his rifle loosely in his hand. The Confederates 
were directly in our front. This soldier was 
apparently in perfect safety. A solid shot 
from a Confederate gun struck the oak tree 
squarely about four feet from the ground ; but 
it did not have sufificient force to tear through 
the tough wood. The soldier fell dead. There 
was not a scratch on him. He was killed by 
concussion. 



HO W MEN DIE IN BA TTLE, 20I 

While we were fighting savagely over these 
intrenchments the woods in our front caught 
fire, and I saw many of our wounded burned to 
death. Must they not have suffered horribly ? 
I am not at all sure of that. The smoke rolled 
heavily and slowly before the fire. It enveloped 
the wounded, and I think that by far the larger 
portion of the men who were roasted were 
suffocated before. the flames curled round them. 
The spectacle was courage-sapping and pitiful, 
and it appealed strongly to the imagination of 
the spectators; but I do not believe that the 
wounded soldiers, who were being burned, suf- 
fered greatly, if they suffered at all. 

Wounded soldiers, it mattered not how slight 
the wounds, generally hastened away from the 
battle lines. A wound entitled a man to go to 
the rear and to a hospital. Of course there 
were many exceptions to this rule, as there 
would necessarily be in battles where from 
twenty thousand to thirty thousand men were 
wounded. I frequently saw slightly wounded 
men who were marching with their colors. I 
personally saw but two men wounded who 
continued to fight. During the first day's 
fighting in the wilderness I saw a youth of 
about twenty years skip and yell, stung by a 



202 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE. 

bullet through the thigh. He turned to limp 
to the rear. After he had gone a few steps he 
stopped, then he kicked out his leg once or 
twice to see if it would work. Then he tore 
the clothing away from his leg so as to see th^ 
wound. He looked at it attentively for an in- 
stant, then kicked out his leg again, then turned 
and took his place in the ranks and resumed 
firing. There was considerable disorder in the 
line, and the soldiers moved to and fro — now a 
few feet to the right, now a few feet to the left. 
One of these movements brought me directly 
behind this wounded soldier. I could see 
plainly from that position, and I pushed into 
the gaping line and began firing. In a minute 
or two the wounded soldier dropped his rifle, 
and, clasping his left arm, exclaimed : *' I am 
hit again ! " He sat down behind the battle 
ranks and tore off the sleeve of his shirt. The 
wound was very slight — not much more than 
skin deep. He tied his handkerchief around it, 
picked up his rifle, and took position alongside 
of me. I said : " You are fighting in bad luck 
to-day. You had better get away from here." 
He turned his head to answer me. His head 
jerked, he staggered, then fell, then regained 
his feet. A tiny fountain of blood and teeth 



HO W MEN DIE IN BA TTLE. 203 

and bone and bits of tongue burst out of lils 
mouth. He had been shot through the jaws ; 
the lower one was broken and hung down. I 
looked directly into his open mouth, which was 
ragged and bloody and tongueless. He cast 
his rifle furiously on the ground and staggered 

off.. 

The next day, just before Longstreet's sol- 
diers made their first charge on the Second 
Corps, I heard the peculiar cry a stricken man 
utters as the bullet tears through his flesh. I 
turned my head, as I loaded my rifle, to see 
who was hit. I saw a bearded Irishman pull 
up his shirt. He had been wounded in the left 
side just below the floating ribs. His face was 
gray with fear. The wound looked as though 
it were mortal. He looked at it for an instant, 
then poked it gently with his index finger. He 
flushed redly, and smiled with satisfaction. He 
tucked his shirt into his trousers, and was fight- 
ing in the ranks again before I had capped my 
rifle. The ball had cut a groove in his skin 
only. The play of this Irishman's face was so 
expressive, his emotions changed so quickly, 
that I could not keep from laughing. 

Near Spottsylvania I saw, as my battery was 
moving into action, a group of wounded men 



204 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVA TE. 

lying in the shade cast by some large oak trees. 
All of these men's faces were gray. They si- 
lently looked at us as we marched past them. 
One wounded man, a blond giant of about 
forty years, was smoking a short briar-wood 
pipe. He had a firm grip on the pipe-stem. I 
asked him what he was doing. " Having my 
last smoke, young fellow," he replied. His 
dauntless blue eyes met mine, and he bravely 
tried to smile. I saw that he was dying fast. 
Another of these wounded men was trying to 
read a letter. He was too weak to hold it, or 
maybe his sight was clouded. He thrust it 
unread into the breast pocket of his blouse, and 
lay back with a moan. This group of wounded 
men numbered fifteen or twenty. At the time, 
I thought that all of them were fatally wound- 
ed, and that there was no use in the surgeons 
wasting time on them, when men who could be 
saved were clamoring for their skilful atten- 
tion. None of these soldiers cried aloud, none 
called on wife, or mother, or father. They lay 
on the ground, pale-faced, and with set jaws, 
waiting for their end. They moaned and 
groaned as they suffered, but none of them 
flunked. When my battery returned from the 
front, five or six hours afterward, almost all of 



HO W MEN DIE IN BA TTLE. 20$ 

these men were dead. Long before the cam- 
paign was over I concluded that dying soldiers 
seldom called on those who were dearest to 
them, seldom conjured their Northern or South- 
ern homes, until they became delirious. Then, 
when their minds wandered, and fluttered at 
the approach of freedom, they babbled of their 
homes. Some were boys again, and were fish- 
ing in Northern trout streams. Some were gen- 
erals leading their men to victory. Some were 
with their wives and children. Some wandered 
over their family's homestead ; but all, with 
rare exceptions, were delirious. 

At the North Anna River, my battery being 
in action, an infantry soldier, one of our sup- 
ports, who was lying face downward close be- 
hind the gun I served on, and in a place where 
he thought he was safe, was struck on the thighs 
by a large jagged piece of a shell. The wound 
made by this fragment of iron was as horrible 
as any I saw in the army. The flesh of both 
thighs was torn off, exposing the bones. The 
soldier bled to death in a few minutes, and be- 
fore he died he conjured his Northern home, 
and murmured of his wife and children. 

In the same battle, but on the south side of 
the river, a man who carried a rifle was passing 



206 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE. 

between the guns and caissons of the battery. 
A solid shot, intended for us, struck him on the 
side. His entire bowels were torn out and 
slung in ribbons and shreds on the ground. 
He fell dead, but his arms and legs jerked con- 
vulsively a few times. It was a sickening spec- 
tacle. During this battle I saw a Union picket 
knocked down, probably by a rifle-ball striking 
his head and glancing from it. He lay as 
though dead. Presently he struggled to his 
feet, and with blood streaming from his head, 
he staggered aimlessly round and round in a 
circle, as sheep afflicted with grubs in the brain 
do. Instantly the Confederate sharp-shooters 
opened fire on him and speedily killed him as 
he circled. 

Wounded soldiers almost always tore their 
clothing away from their wounds, so as to see 
them and to judge of their character. Many of 
them would smile and their faces would bright- 
en as they realized that they were not hard hit, 
and that they could go home for a few months. 
Others would give a quick glance at their 
wounds and then shrink back as from a blow, 
and turn pale, as they realized the truth that 
they were mortally wounded. The enlisted 
men were exceedingly accurate judges of the 



HO W MEN DIE IN BA TTLE. 20/ 

probable result which would ensue from any 
wound they saw. They had seen hundreds of 
soldiers wounded, and they had noticed that 
certain wounds always resulted fatally. They 
knew when they were fatally wounded, and 
after the shock of discovery had passed, they 
generally braced themselves and died in a man- 
ly manner. It was seldom that an American 
or Irish volunteer flunked in the presence of 
death. 



XII. 

EARLY IN FRONT OF WASHINGTON. 

MY experience as an enlisted man during 
Grant's last campaign ended when I 
left City Point, Virginia. I write this and the 
succeeding chapters to present certain condi- 
tions and facts in the war, which fell within my 
personal experience, and which, I think, merit 
permanent record. 

I arrived in Washington June 25, 1864, and 
re-enlisted in the United States Army the same 
day. I spent six days in my father's house, 
sleeping and fighting off fever. On June 30th, I 
was appointed Second Lieutenant in the Fourth 
United States Artillery, and a verbal leave of 
absence was granted to me by Secretary of War 
Stanton, whom I found, contrary to my expec- 
tation, to be a very kind and pleasant-spoken 
gentleman. 

About July 1st, a rumor circulated through 
Washington that our troops had met with a 

208 



EARLY IN FRONT OF WASHINGTON. 209 

serious disaster in the neighborhood of Mar- 
tinsburg. Then men whispered one to the 
other that a large Confederate army was rava- 
ging the southern border of Pennsylvania, and 
that Washington was threatened. There was 
great uneasiness in the capitol. President Lin- 
coln called on the States of New York, Pennsyl- 
vania, and Massachusetts for troops to aid in 
repelling the invasion. The rumors grew 
thicker and thicker, and all of them were un- 
favorable to the Union cause. The only report 
we could rely on was that Early's corps, of the 
Army of Northern Virginia, had been detached 
by Lee to drive the Union forces out of Shen- 
andoah Valley, to ravage Southern Pennsyl- 
vania, and to capture the national capitol, if 
possible. Washington was in an uproar. In 
the morning we heard that Early was at a cer- 
tain point. At night he was reported as being 
fifty miles from there. To-day his army was 
alleged to number 30,000 men. On the morrow, 
pale-faced, anxious men solemnly asserted that 
certain information had been received at the 
War Department that at least 50,000 veteran 
soldiers were marching with Early. Late at 
night on July 9th, I was sitting in Willard's 
Hotel. An excited man walked rapidly in and 



2IO RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE. 

told the group in which I was talking, that our 
army, under General Lew Wallace, had been 
disastrously defeated on the Monocacy by 
Early, and that our disordered troops were in 
full retreat on Baltimore. Later we heard that 
Wallace's army had been annihilated. Still 
later that the government's books, records, 
and money were being packed in boxes pre- 
paratory to its flight to New York. Almost 
every man I met that night believed that the 
Confederate guns would be thundering at the 
capital in less than twenty-four hours. 

The next morning the report of our defeat 
on the Monocacy was confirmed, and the ex- 
citement in the city grew more and more 
intense. Men stood in groups on street cor- 
ners, in hotel lobbies, in newspaper offices, and 
in drinking saloons, and discussed the military 
situation. Officers rode furiously up and down 
the streets, and swarmed around the War De- 
partment. I began to think that maybe Early 
would make a dash at Washington. So I 
walked to the War Department and reported 
for duty. I was greatly astonished at the 
authentic news I heard. War. Department 
officials told me that General Auger, who had 
command of the troops at Washington, did not 



EARLY IN FRONT OF WASHINGTON. 211 

have 5,000 stanch, veteran soldiers with which 
to defend the entire line, which was about 
thirty miles long. He had a few 100-day 
men, a few quartermaster employes, and some 
disabled soldiers, called veteran reserves. I 
was assured that a successful defence of the 
city could not be made, unless reinforcements 
speedily arrived. Finally I was ordered to re- 
port for duty to the commanding ofificer of 
Battery A Fourth United States Artillery, then 
in garrison at Fort Totten, near Bladensburg. 

Arrived at the fort, I found it was command- 
ed by a captain of a 100-day regiment from Ohio, 
and that the regular army artillerists were 
under his orders. This Ohio captain carried 
matters with a light hand. He was anxious to 
be advised, and cheerfully allowed the artillery 
ofificers to do as they thought best in all mat- 
ters relative to the defence of the fort. Battery 
A was commanded by handsome, songful Rufus 
King. Howard B. Gushing, a brother of the 
''Gettysburg" and the ''Albemarle" Gushings, 
was a second lieutenant in this battery. It 
had been serving with Guster as horse artillery, 
and had been badly cut up in front of Rich- 
mond, and had been sent to Washington for 
rest. Neither the officers nor the men under- 



212 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE. 

stood handling the large guns with which the 
fort was armed. On the parade ground within 
the fort were six brass James guns. We quickly- 
decided to use these in the threatened battle. 
The magazine was opened. Barrels of powder 
were brought out and rolled up and down, and 
placed in the sunshine to thoroughly dry. 
Shot and shell and stands of grape were 
brought out, and all hands made cartridges for 
the lOO-pound Parrotts, and assorted the am- 
munition for the James guns, which were 
placed in position on the side of the fort which 
we expected to be attacked. 

Late in the afternoon, July loth, word was 
sent to us from Washington that Early was 
marching with his entire army on the capital, 
and that he was then near Rockville. That 
evening the motliest crowd of soldiers I ever saw 
came straggling out from Washington to man the 
rifle-pits which connected the forts. This force 
was composed of quartermaster's employes, 
clerks from the War, Navy, and State depart- 
ments, convalescents from the military hospi- 
tals, and veteran reserves, the latter clad in 
the disheartening, sickly uniform of pale blue, 
which was the distinctive dress of that corps. 
(The Confederates aptly characterized these 



EARLY IN FRONT OF WASHINGTON. 21 3 

disabled soldiers as '' Condemned Yankees.") 
There was little order or discipline among these 
pretended soldiers. The sturdy Irishmen who 
manned our guns and who had been forged into 
perfect soldiers by *' Gettysburg " Gushing, 
gazed at them with open-eyed astonishment. 
They gabbled, and were evidently trying to 
keep up their courage by talking loudly and 
boastfully of their determination to hold the 
rifle-pits at all hazards. I smiled sorrowfully 
as I thought of the ease with which the Con- 
federates, veterans of twenty pitched-battles, 
would drive them out of their earthworks. 
The 1 00-day men who were in the fort were 
somewhat nervous ; but they meant to fight, 
and when they had been warmed in battle fire, 
and men had begun to fall, they undoubtedly 
would have fought stanchly. 

That night. King, Gushing, and I slept on 
the top of the magazine, and the cannoneers 
slept on the ground by their guns. Early the 
next morning we saw that a signal-station had 
been established on the top of the Soldiers' 
Home, and that officers of the signal corps 
were furiously waving flags to communicate in- 
formation to head-quarters. We knew that 
important news was being waved through the 



214 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE, 

air, but we could not read the signals. So we 
began to search through our field-glasses for 
the Confederate soldiers. We found them 
soon. A body of Confederate cavalry rode 
aimlessly to and fro along the edge of a wood, 
about five miles from our fort. We saw their 
artillery glisten in the sun. Soon smoke began 
to rise in heavy columns behind them, and I 
knew that they were burning houses. That 
afternoon the Confederate infantry came in 
sight, and formed a battle line. Portions of 
this line were within range of some of the forts, 
and heavy guns opened on it away off to our 
left. This artillery practice, marked by the 
bursting shells, was the poorest I ever saw. It 
was evident that the department clerks or the 
lOO-day men were serving the guns. The Con- 
federates did not pay the slightest attention to 
this fire. Their skirmishers, a cloud of them, 
advanced a short distance from their main line, 
and then sank out of sight. 

We grew anxious. I knew that Early, who 
had about eighteen thousand veteran soldiers 
with him, could break our line whenever he 
saw fit to strike it. I knew that he could 
capture Washington in two hours, if he de- 
termined to take the national capital. How 



EARLY IN FRONT OF WASHINGTON. 215 

we fumed and fretted ! Before sunrise on July 
I2th we saw that Early's men were in motion. 
They moved slowly toward our intrenchments, 
with a heavy line of skirmishers preceding their 
battle line. These skirmishers drove our pick- 
ets before them with great ease. The Con- 
federate battle line advanced until they were 
within long-cannon range of the forts. Their 
skirmishers were within rifle range, and Con- 
federate bullets occasionally sang above us. 
Many heavy guns opened on the battle line. 
It halted, and the men lay down in the grass, 
among bushes, and behind buildings. Ammu- 
nition was in plentiful supply in Fort Totten, 
and we manned three one-hundred-pound Par- 
rott guns, and wasted a ton of shells to get the 
range and to burn a few vision-obscuring houses 
which stood on the ground over which we ex- 
pected the charge to be made. Through our 
glasses we could see the disposition of Early's 
troops. We three young artillery ofificers sat 
on the magazine and studied his line. We 
speedily saw that his troops were not formed 
in charging column ; saw that there was no re- 
serve ; saw that there was no eager hurrying to 
and fro of soldiers ; saw that there was no pre- 
paratory bustle ; saw, that though the Confed- 



2l6 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE. 

erate skirmishers were far in advance of the 
main Hne, they were not pushing our pickets, 
and were not firing with earnestness. Evident- 
ly there was to be no serious fighting that morn- 
ing. We continued to shell the Confederate 
line without a particle of effect, unless to excite 
the contempt of veteran soldiers. 

Toward evening General Auger drew a heavy 
body of troops from our thin defensive line, 
and sent them out to feel of Early's men. 
Naturally the latter objected to being felt of. 
So they promptly killed and wounded three 
hundred of Auger's men. These having had 
enough of dallying with savage-tempered and 
veteran Confederate infantry, skurried back to 
our intrenchments. 

Next morning opened with a heavy fire from 
the forts to our left, and more houses were 
burned. The position of the Confederate 
pickets, marked by rifle flashes and tiny puffs of 
powder-smoke, was apparently unchanged ; but 
their main line had been drawn back to the shel- 
ter of the woods. We were anxiously debating 
the question : '' Is Early forming his soldiers 
into a charging column ? " when we heard a 
clatter of galloping horses, and a signal corps of- 
ficer and two enlisted men rode up to the gate of 



EARLY IN FRONT OF WASHINGTON. 21/ 

the fort and demanded admittance. Admitted, 
they clambered on to the magazine. Eager for 
news, we assailed the officer with questions. 
He told us that the Union people in Washing- 
ton had been panic-stricken ; that ^e govern- 
ment had been ready to leave the city ; that 
the money and books had been packed prepara- 
tory to shipment north ; that the majority of 
the masculine portion of the entire city had got 
wildly drunk and kept so ; and that the Sixth 
Corps was coming up the Potomac River to the 
defence of Washington. He began to wave his 
flags. The signal flags on top of the Soldiers* 
Home waved back in answer, and as they waved 
the signal officer slowly read out the message, 
word by word : *' Transports loaded with troops 
in sight." About seven o'clock the flags which 
were on top of the Soldiers* Home waved brisk- 
ly. The signal corps officer answered an in- 
quiring look by reading aloud : " Sixth Corps 
disembarking. Troops marching for the front.'* 
Now we were as anxious for Early to assault 
our works, as we had been fearful of his doing 
so the previous day. We had the Sixth Corps, 
stanch, determined fighters, at our backs. We 
were no longer fearful of our supports running 
away in panic. Again the flags waved. Again 



2l8 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE. 

the signal officer read to us : *' Infantry turned 
into Seventh Street. All troops marching to 
the front." I could have hugged that signal 
corps officer. He rolled up his flags, bade us 
good day, and smilingly said : " Gentlemen, 
you are saved from the mortification of losing 
your fort. And, thank God ! Washington is 
saved from capture." He turned, mounted his 
horse, and rode out of the fort. 

Down the road, away past the Soldiers* 
Home, we heard faint strains of martial music. 
Then we saw a column of dust rising. It rose 
high above the trees, high above the houses. 
Then its head was thrust into sight, a few dust- 
obscured officers riding in advance, the dust 
sloping upward and backward from them. Close 
behind them came a large banner, blazoned 
with a great crimson cross. It was the flag of 
the First Division of the Sixth Corps. Clouds 
of dust rolled heavily upward, almost obscuring 
it at times, but I watched it intently, and my 
throat filled, and my heart thumped. The Con- 
federate skirmishers disappeared. The Sixth 
Corps marched on to the battle-ground, formed 
line, and, preceded by hundreds of skirmishers, 
advanced. Alas, too late ! The last Confed- 
erates had hastened after their leader, and 



EARLY IN FRONT OF WASHINGTON. 219 

were well on their way to the Shenandoah 

Valley. 

Could Early have captured Washington on 
June 11-12, 1864? I unhesitatingly answer, 
yes. I supplement this by saying that he could 
have taken the city without losing more than 
one thousand men. But if he had taken it, his 
poorly clad, poorly fed, impoverished men 
would inevitably have gone to plundering, 
would inevitably have gotten drunk and stayed 
drunk, and he would have lost his entire army. 



XIII. 

THE MILITARY PRISON AT ELMIRA. 

AFTER General Early had withdrawn his 
soldiers from the front of Washington, 
Battery A Fourth United States Artillery 
joined the artillery reserve then lying in Camp 
Barry, near Washington. Life in Camp Barry 
was exceedingly monotonous, and enlisted men 
and officers alike were impatient to be ordered 
to active service. There was joy in the camp, 
one afternoon in late fall, when an order came, 
directing the commanding officer of Battery 
A to go at once to Elmira, New York, with 
a section of artillery, and to report for duty 
to the commanding officer of that post. The 
senior lieutenant, Rufus King, was absent on 
leave. Lieutenant Cushing, eager to get out 
of Washington, ordered me to get a section 
in marching order. I did so, and we marched 
to the railroad station, and loaded the guns, 
caissons, and horses on the cars, and left Wash- 

220 



THE MILITAR Y PJilSON A T ELMIRA. 221 

ington in less than two hours after receiving 

the order. , ... 

We had heard that the Confederate soldiers 
who were confined in the military prison at EI- 
mirawere somewhat unruly, and ne.xt day, when 
we reported for duty to a loo-day colonel, we 
were not surprised to hear that the prisoners 
were insubordinate, and that an outbreak was 
imminent. We marched the battery to the mili- 
tary prison. There we found about twelve thou- 
sand Confederate prisoners, who were confined 
in a large stockade, inside of which were many 
barracks, and through which the Chemung 
River flowed. The stockade, made of logs set 
deeply in the ground on end and standing side 
by side, was about twelve feet high. About 
four feet below the top of the stockade, on the 
outside, was a platform, guarded by a handrai , 
which extended around the prison. This plat- 
form was studded by sentry-boxes at short in- 
tervals On it sentinels walked to and fro, day 
and night, and watched the prisoners During 
the night they, at half hour intervals, loudly 
called the number to their post, and announced 
that all was well. It was almost dark when we 
arrived at the prison, and we parked the guns 
in an open space near the stockade. Around 



222 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVA TE. 

us were many camps, which were occupied 
by disorderly, undrilled loo-day men. We 
speedily discovered that there was a lack 
of discipline in the prison. The Confederates 
were ugly-tempered and rebellious. That night 
they gathered in mobs, and the Confederate 
charging-yell rang out clearly. They threw 
stones at the sentinels. They refused to go 
into their barracks. Evidently they knew that 
the men who guarded them were not soldiers. 
The uproar increased in volume. I was con- 
fident that the prisoners intended to break out 
that night. Our guns were placed in battery, 
and the ammunition chests opened. We wait- 
ed, and waited, and waited, and finally I rode 
over to an infantry camp in search of informa- 
tion, and there found a lOO-day colonel, who 
was playing cribbage with a sergeant. I asked 
the meaning of the uproar in the prison, and 
the colonel said, indifferently : " Oh, that is 
nothing ! They generally make twice as much 
noise," and he continued to move his pegs up 
and down the cribbage-board. I returned to 
camp greatly disgusted. 

The next day Cushing and I went into the 
prison, and after carefully examining it, con- 
cluded that if an attempt to break guard was 



THE MILITARY PRISON AT ELMIRA. 223 

made it would be directed against the point 
where the river left the stockade. As we 
walked slowly around the prison, groups of 
Confederates looked curiously at us and talked 
insultingly about us. One crowd of men fol- 
lowed us to the river bank and jeered us as we in- 
spected the stockade there. Gushing lost his 
temper and turned savagely to face them, and 

said in a low, clear voice : " See here, ! 

I am just up from the front, where I have been 
killing such infernal wretches as you are. I have 
met you in twenty battles. I never lost a gun 
to you. You never drove a battery I served 
with from its position. You are a crowd of in- 
solent, cowardly scoundrels, and if I had com- 
mand of this prison I would discipline you, 
or kill you, and I should much prefer to kill 
you. I have brought a battery of United 
States artillery to this pen, and if you will 
give me occasion I will be glad to dam that 
river," pointing to the Chemung, "with your 
worthless carcasses, and silence your insolent 
tongues forever. I fully understand that you 
are presuming on your position as prisoners of 
war when you talk to me as you have ; but," 
and here his hand shook warningly in the faces 
of the group, '' you have reached the end of 



224 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVA TE, 

your rope with me. I will kill the first man of 
you who again speaks insultingly to me while I 
am in this pen, and I shall be here daily. Now, 
go to your quarters." And they went. We re- 
turned to our camp, moved the guns to a posi- 
tion which commanded the river, and then rear- 
ranged the ammunition, putting all the canister 
in the chests of the gun limbers. And then we 
waited for the expected outbreak. 

A military prison, it matters not what people 
keep it, is not a place where life is enjoyed. 
The prisoners are enemies, and their keepers 
care but little for their lives or comfort. It 
is probable that we fed the Confederate pris- 
oners better than they fed Union prisoners. 
Personally I know nothing of life in Confed- 
erate military prisons, as I was not captured. I 
saw many thousands of our soldiers shortly after 
they were exchanged. By far the larger portion 
of these men were in good condition and fit for 
service. It is true that many of them were dis- 
eased and almost dead when they were deliv- 
ered to us, and these soldiers were grouped and 
photographed, very unfairly I think, and the 
illustrated papers which reproduced these pho- 
tographs were widely circulated throughout the 
Northern States. I met no Union soldier who 



THE MILITARY PRISON AT ELM IRA. 22$ 

had been confined in a Confederate military 
prison, who thought it to be a pleasant re- 
treat ; and I know that the military prison at 
Elmira war. a place to be avoided by men of 
good taste. The prisoners, it was alleged, were 
allowed the same rations, excepting coffee and 
sugar, that their guards received. They did 
not get it. I repeatedly saw the Confederate 
prisoners draw their provisions, and they never 
got more than two thirds rations. Many of 
them were diseased, many were sHghtly wound- 
ed, many were feeble and worn out with cam- 
paigning in Virginia, and many more were 
home-sick; and these men died as sheep with 
the rot. Almost daily a wagon piled high with 
pine coffins entered the stockade, and these 
coffins were filled with dead Confederates. 
The sound men, the men of vigorous con- 
stitution, and those possessing aggressive 
minds, endured prison life without suffering 
greatly ; and this I suspect was true of Union 
soldiers confined in Confederate prisons. The 
winter of 1864-65 was exceedingly cold. The 
Confederate prisoners, thinly clad, enfeebled 
by campaigning, and further weakened by in- 
sufficient supplies of food, were unable to en- 
dure the cold of a Northern winter. They 



226 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE. 

died by the hundred. They were mentally 
depressed, and the inevitable result followed. 
Their wounds became gangrenous and they 
died ; they were home-sick and they died ; they 
contracted pneumonia and died. Fever stalked 
among them and struck hundreds of them 
down. Bowel disorders carried off other hun- 
dreds. I have seen groups of battle-worn, home- 
sick Confederates, their thin blankets drawn 
tightly around their shoulders, stand in the lee 
of a barrack for an hour without speaking to 
one another. They stood motionless and gazed 
into one another's haggard faces with despairing 
eyes. There was no need to talk, as all topics 
of conversation had long since been exhausted. 
The majority of the prisoners were exceed- 
ingly ignorant. Many of them could not read 
or write. I often admired the militarv skill 
displayed by the Confederate officers in forging 
these ignorant men into the almost perfect 
soldiers they were. The discipline in the Con- 
federate armies must have been exceedingly 
severe to have enabled their officers to control 
these reckless, savage-tempered men. The 
prisoners ^ at Elmira were exclusively Ameri- 
cans. I did not see a foreign-born citizen in 
that prison. These soldiers were penniless. 



THE MILITARY PRISON AT ELM IRA. 22/ 

They could not buy clothing or articles of prime 
necessity. They were eager to work, to earn 
money to buy tobacco. On pleasant days a 
few hundred of them were employed outside 
the stockade in digging ditches and trenches 
which were never used. For this work they 
were paid about twenty-five cents per day, 
which sum they promptly invested in tobacco. 
I have seen the prisoners display as much 
eagerness to secure this employment, as free 
men v/ould to secure remunerative positions 
of trust. And they worked faithfully and 
honestly, and earned their scanty pay. Thinly 
clad, with their blankets wound around them 
instead of overcoats, poorly fed, hopeless, these 
unfortunate soldiers swung heavy picks, and 
bent low over their shovels, as the cold wind 
swept through their emaciated frames as 
through a sieve. It was pitiful to see the 
poverty-stricken Confederates breaking the 
hard, frost-bound earth, while armed sentinels 
passed to and fro about them, and a battery of 
artillery moved swiftly over the frozen plain in 
menacing drill. 

Outside of the stockade, and on the other 
side of the road, two tall wooden towers had 
been built by some enterprising Yankees. The 



228 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVA TE. 

owners of these buildings made a profitable 
show of the Confederate prisoners. Daily their 
tops were thronged with curious spectators, 
who paid ten cents each to look into the prison 
pen. A few weeks after these towers were 
built, I noticed that a young and handsome 
woman visited one of them daily, and waved 
her handkerchief frequently. It was evident 
to me that she was communicating with the 
prisoners, probably to her friends or relatives 
who were confined in the stockade. One night 
seven or eight Confederates escaped from the 
prison by crawling through a tunnel that they 
had dug, and were seen no more. I was 
exceedingly glad that these men had escaped. 
The young woman disappeared also. Then I 
reported what I had seen, and the towers were 
closed by military orders. 

One night the uproar in the stockade was 
terrific. A rifle shot rang out clearly. I heard 
a sentinel on post call for the officer of the 
guard. The long roll sounded in the infantry 
camps. The noise of infantry falling into line 
hummed in the air. The night was intensely 
dark. I stood in the door of my tent listening 
to the uproar in the Confederate pen. I judged 
that the prisoners were divided into two groups ; 
one standing by the river bank, the other near 



THE MILITARY PRISON AT ELMIRA, 229 

the gate. Both groups were yelling at the top 
of their voices. Some of the soldiers of the 
regular brigade, which had been sent from the 
Army of the Potomac to assist in guarding the 
prisoners, were on duty that night. And I 
heard these cool veterans caution the Con- 
federates not to cross the dead-line, and to re- 
peatedly tell them to stand back or they would 
fire on them. Another shot rang out clearly. 
My battery bugler, a Jew, named Samuels, 
came to me, bugle in hand. "" Blow Boots and 
Saddles," I said. Instantly the artillery camp 
was alive. Half-dressed men sprang to the 
guns, horses were harnessed and saddled. I 
called an old sergeant to me and said : *^ Trail 
No. 2 gun on the stockade near the river, 
and if the prisoners break out, dose the head 
of the column with double canister until they 
run over your gun. Fire a blank cartridge 
to summon Lieutenant Gushing and the en- 
listed men, who are in town, to the battery. 
I will take No. i gun close to the stock- 
ade and smash the flank of the column to 
flinders if it comes out. I will burn a lantern 
by the gun so as to mark my position." The 
sergeant moved off in the darkness. I saw the 
flash of his gun, heard a shot scream close 
above my head, and then heard the crash of 



230 RECOLLECTIOXS OF A PRIVATE. 

timber as the shot tore through a barrack, and 
this was followed by cries of alarm. I heard 
the Confederates zry : " Look out, the artillery 
has opened ! " Instantly the uproar ceased. 
The great prison was as silent as death, and 
instantly I knew I was in a scrape, and would 
probably be court-martialed for firing on the 
prisoners. Out of town came Gushing, his 
horse in a lather. I explained to him what 
had happened. He looked soberly at me for 
an instant, and then said : '' You will be court- 
martialed, sure. You must get to your own 
battery at once (I belonged to Battery H), and 
get off before the icXD-day officers prefer charges 
against you. Then we can talk them out of 
it." An officer from head-quarters rode up and 
complained bitterly of the outrage of firing on 
the prisoners. From him we learned that it 
was a stone instead of a shot that had been 
fired into the prison. Early the next morning 
I left Elmira, having been ordered by a speedily 
procured telegram to join Battery H, Fourth 
United States Artillery, in the department of 
the Cumberland. I afterwards learned that a 
few Confederates were wounded by splinters 
when the stone struck the barrack, and that they 
never again made night hideous by their yells 
and howls. 



XIV. 

IN THE SOUTHWEST. 

WHEN I arrived at Nashville, Tennessee, 
I was told that my battery was at the 
front, probably near Stevenson, Alabama. I 
went to that town, and there met Lieutenant 
John Stevenson, Fourth United States Artil- 
lery, whose temper was as sunny as his hair, 
and he told me that my battery was with the 
Fourth Corps, then marching on Huntsville, 
Alabama, but that the corps could not possibly 
arrive there for two or three days. Stevenson 
invited me to stay with him for a day, and I 
accepted his invitation. 

At Stevenson there was a large refugee 
camp, where many women and children and a 
few crippled or age-enfeebled men had sought 
refuge from attacks by murderous bands of 
guerrillas. The camp had probably been aban- 
doned when Hood swept north with his army, 
and the refugees had sought shelter and food 

231 



232 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE. 

as best they could. Hood's army went to 
pieces after being defeated at Nashville, and 
the refugees again gathered at Stevenson. 
Guerrillas infested the southern highlands. 
These pretended soldiers, it mattered not 
which uniform they disgraced by wearing, 
were, almost without exception, robbers and 
murderers, who sought to enrich themselves by 
plundering their defenceless neighbors. They 
rode through the southern highlands, killing 
men, burning houses, stealing cattle and horses. 
To-day a band of guerrillas, alleged Unionists, 
ravaged a mountain district. They killed their 
personal enemies, whom they said were Con- 
federate sympathizers, and destroyed their 
property. To-morrow other guerrillas burned 
Union men's houses, and shot so-called Union 
men to death. This relentless, mountain war- 
fare was exceedingly hard on women and chil- 
dren. Agriculture was suspended in the high- 
lands. No man dared to till his lean fields for 
fear that some hidden enemy might kill him. 
No stack of unthrashed grain or garner of corn 
was safe from the torch. The defenceless 
women and children were starved out of their 
homes, and they sought safety and food within 
the Union lines. Our government established 



I AT THE SOUTHWEST, 233 

extensive camps for these war-stricken South- 
erners. 

Curious to see these people I spent a day in 
camp at Stevenson. I saw hundreds of tall, 
gaunt, frouzy-headed, snuff-dipping, pipe-smok- 
ing, unclean women. Some were clad in home- 
spun stuffs, others in calico, others in bagging. 
Many of them were unshod. There were hun- 
dreds and hundreds of vermin-infested and su- 
premely dirty children in the camp. Some 
families lived in tents, some in flimsy barracks. 
All lived in discomfort. All drew rations from 
the government. All were utterly poor. It 
seemed that they were too poor to ever again 
get a start in life. Haggard, wind- and sun- 
and storm-burnt women, their gaunt forms 
showing plainly through their rags, sat, or 
lolled, or stood in groups, talking drawlingly. 
Their features were as expressionless as wood, 
their eyes lustreless. I talked to many of 
these women. All told stories of murder, of 
arson, of blood-curdling scenes. One, gray- 
eyed, bony, square-jawed, barefooted, forty 
years old, clad in a dirty, ragged, homespun 
dress, sat on a log outside of a tent sucking a 
corn-cob pipe. Her tow-headed children played 
around her. She told me that before the war 



234 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVA TE. 

she and her husband owned a mountain farm, 
where they lived in comfort ; that they owned 
horses, cattle, and pigs, and raised plenty of 
corn and tobacco. One day her husband, who 
was a Union man, was shot dead as he stood 
by her side in the door of their house. She 
buried him in a grave she dug herself. She and 
her children tended the crops. These were 
burned shortly after they gathered them. Then 
her swine were stolen, and her cows and horse 
driven off. Finally her oldest son, a boy of 
fourteen, was shot dead at the spring, and her 
house and barn were burned in broad daylight, 
and she and her children were left homeless and 
without food on a desolate mountain side. 
Many of her neighbors had been burned out 
the same day. They joined forces and wan- 
dered down the mountain, hungry, cold, with 
little children tugging at women's dresses, to a 
Union camp. From there they had been sent 
to Stevenson. Long before this woman had 
finished her story she rose to her feet, her face 
was white with intense passion, her eyes blazed 
with fire, and her gaunt form quivered with ex- 
citement as she gesticulated savagely. She 
said that if she lived, and her boys lived, that 
she would have vengeance on the men who had 



IN THE SOUTHWEST, 235 

murdered her husband and son, and destroyed 
her home. As she talked so talked all. These 
women were saturating their children's minds 
with the stories of the wrongs they had endured. 
I heard them repeat over and over to their 
children the names of men which they were 
never to forget, and whom they were to kill 
when they had sufficient strength to hold a 
rifle. The stolid manners, the wooden faces, 
the lustreless eyes, the drawling speech of these 
people, concealed the volcanoes of fire and 
wrath which burned within their breasts. One 
woman dramatically described the death of her 
husband. The puff of powder smoke curling 
above the clump of laurel, the reeling man with 
blood gushing from his mouth, the digging of his 
grave, the midnight burial, — all were pictured. 
These women, who had been driven from their 
homes by the most savage warfare our country 
has been cursed with, knew what war was, and 
they impressed me as living wholly to revenge 
their wrongs. It was easy to foresee the years 
of bloodshed, of assassination, of family feuds, 
that would spring from the recollections of the 
war, handed from widowed mothers to savage- 
tempered sons, in the mountain recesses of 
Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, and Kentucky^ 



236 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVA TE, 

And long after the war closed rifles continued 
to crack in remote mountain glens, as the open 
accounts between families were settled. 

I started for Huntsville the next morning. 
The railroad was dilapidated. Tiny columns of 
mud spouted in the air as the wheels rolled over 
the splintered rails. The train consisted of open 
and box cars, which were loaded with veteran 
soldiers returning to their commands. These 
soldiers were almost without exception Ameri- 
cans, and were reckless and apparently indiffer- 
ent to danger. Two or three piles of clay were 
thrown on each car, and the men tramped it into 
rough hearths, about a foot thick and four feet 
square, and built fires on them. Around these 
fires the soldiers crowded to cook their rations. 
At every station the supply of firewood we car- 
ried was added to. The bottom of the cars 
charred and holes were formed. I expected 
the train to catch fire and burn. The soldiers 
sang wild and profane songs, and kept time 
by sounding their ramrods in their musket bar- 
rels, or by softly tapping them with steel bay- 
onets. It begain to rain and the wind blew 
strongly. These soldiers, exposed to the storm 
on open cars, built their fires higher and sang 
tunefully through it. They were courageous, 



IN THE SOUTHWEST. 237 

imaginative, reckless Western American volun- 
teers, an entirely different race of men from 
their Eastern brothers. _ 

About midnight the train halted at Pamt 
Rock River (the railroad bridge which spanned 
that stream had been burned by guerrillas the 
previous night, and some scores of army bridge- 
builders were at work to replace it) and the 
soldiers clambered off of the cars. They built 
fires on the bank of the rapid, swollen stream, 
and then, without an instant's hesitation, began 
to build a raft, on which to cross the river. 1 
was greatly impressed by the self-reliant man- 
hood of these enlisted men. When the raft 
was finished a number of men crowded on it 
and poled it across the river. Fires by which 
to see were built on the other side. The rait 
was poled to and fro and the troops were slow- 
ly ferried across. Eager to cross, to get near 
to their regiments, they frequently overloaded 
the raft and it sank deeply in the water. 1 hen 
the soldiers would spring ashore or fall into the 
river, out of which they swam, or were pulled 
by their comrades. The result was inevitable. 
On the sixth trip the raft was loaded so heavdy 
that the water was over the sh°e^°f /^V.? 
diers It was safely poled to the middle of the 



238 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVA TE. 

stream. There it tilted, and with a howl the 
soldiers slid into the water. Most of them 
swam ashore, rifle in hand, or clambered back 
on the raft. But I saw five men, who were 
heavily laden with cartridges or could not 
swim, sink into the cold water to be seen no 
more. The men who had clambered on the 
raft poled it back to shore and called for an- 
other cargo, and other men swarmed on to the 
perilous craft. No one paid the slightest atten- 
tion to the drowned men. I saw that I could 
not get across the river for hours, so I hung my 
rubber blanket over a bush and sat under it to 
watch the scene. The wind had ceased to 
blow, and the rain fell gently. Great fires of 
logs and railroad ties burned brightly. Scores 
of bridge-builders worked in torch-relieved 
darkness. Another train loaded with troops 
came up, and these men rushed to the river's 
bank. A thousand soldiers were grouped at 
the river, and as they stood in the rain they 
sang " John Brown " and kept time with sound- 
ing rifles. The two empty trains backed off. 
Presently another train thundered down the 
railroad track, and stopped on a high, rocky 
embankment directly in front of me. It was 
loaded with escaped negro slaves, who had fled 



IN THE SOUTHWEST. 239 

from many cotton plantations, and who had 
burdened themselves with plunder stolen from 
their masters' houses. The train hands, who 
were soldiers, roughly hustled the negroes from 
the train and carelessly threw their baggage af- 
ter them. Trunks, boxes, costly articles of fur- 
niture, and rolls of blankets and clothing were 
thrown down the embankment, rolling, slowly 
at first, then faster and faster, to the bottom. 
Many trunks and boxes leaped high in the air 
and struck heavily on rocks when they de- 
scended. These burst open and their con- 
tents were scattered. Excited negroes chased 
their boxes down the embankment, to be fright- 
ened and confused by other boxes bounding 
past them. Black men howled ; black women 
screamed ; black babies cried. After the de- 
struction of personal property had ceased, 
these wretched, rain-soaked people gathered 
their effects as best they could and straggled 
off into the forest. There presently fires 

glowed. 

Next day I arrived at Huntsville. At head- 
quarters I was told that my battery was proba- 
bly serving with General Wilson's cavalry, and 
that he and General Thomas were supposed to 
be somewhere in Northern Mississippi. I se- 



240 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE. 

cured orders and transportation, and promptly 
started back to Nashville on an open box car. 
The train stopped in a forest to take on wood, 
which was piled at a side track. The conduce 
tor told me that the train would stay on the 
side track for three or four hours. I picked up 
my blankets, jumped off the car, and walked in- 
to the sunny forest. The locomotive's whistle 
sounded. The train rolled off. The enlisted 
men jeered me. I was in no hurry, and rather 
enjoyed the situation. The Alabama woods 
were pleasant. I would wait for the next train. 
Noon came. Late in the afternoon I resolved 
to walk to the next station, where I knew 
Union soldiers were on guard. While I was 
at Huntsville I had learned that the region I 
was in was infested with guerillas, at the head 
of whom was a murderous ruffian, named Dick 
Cotton. This man was described to be wholly 
devilish. It was alleged that he murdered every 
Union soldier that fell into his hands, and 
that he invariably acted on the maxim that 
dead men tell no tales. As I walked with 
uneven steps on the ties, the stories I had 
heard of Dick Cotton and his band of murder- 
ers filled my brain. To my right was a high, 
precipitous mountain range. The whole region 



IKF THE SOUTHWEST. 24 1 

seemed to be deserted. Darkness, gray and 
gloom}^, began to gather in the forest. I heard 
a flock of wild turkeys calling one another. 
Then I saw them walk briskly among the trees. 
Seeing me they ran swiftly out of sight. The 
sun sank behind the mountains. To my right 
I saw a column of smoke rising out of a ravine. 
I left the railroad track and walked through 
the forest to the ravine. While walking, I 
crossed a heavy bridle path which led up the 
gulch, and presumably across the mountain. A 
small, dilapidated log-house and a few out- 
buildings stood in a cleared field in the ravine. 
There were neither dogs nor chickens around 
this place. I walked slowly to the door of the 
house and knocked. A surly, gray-haired, 
savage-faced white man opened it. Under his 
left armpit was a rude crutch. He looked at 
me with fiery eyes as I stated my case, and 
then gruffly bade me enter. A yellow negro 
man, whom I saw was the son of the white man, 
sat on the stool before the fire cooking supper. 
The manner of my host changed. He smiled 
and talked and endeavored to simulate good 
comradeship. I Instantly realized that I was in 
danger. The yellow man could not conceal his 
hostility. After supper I heard a horse stamp 



242 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVA TE. 

in one of the out-buildings. My host continued 
to smile and talk of the times before the war, 
and of his plantation in the valley below, where 
he had worked twenty slaves in productive 
cotton fields. He told how they had all run 
away, excepting the boy (a broad-shouldered 
man of thirty years) who still served him ; and 
he prated about the wickedness of war, and of 
his gladness that it was almost over, and the 
useless shedding of fraternal blood near its end. 
As he talked, his cruel black eyes gleamed with 
hostility and belied his words. I turned to 
speak to the slave, who sat smoking and blow- 
ing his tobacco-smoke up the chimney, and saw 
that he was furtively watching his master, and 
out of the tail of my eye I saw the white man 
jerk his left thumb toward the door, motioning 
to the slave to go outside. Soon the negro 
arose and went out, after firewood he said. 
Presently my host arose, excused himself, 
placed his crutch under his arm, and said : *' I 
must go see what keeps that lazy nigger." He 
stumped across the floor, opened the door, and 
went out, leaving the door slightly ajar behind 
him. I walked softly across the floor and 
listened with keen ear at the crack. I heard 
him whisper to the slave : ** Charles, saddle 



IN THE SOUTHWEST. 243 

the mare, ride across the mountain and tell 
Mr. Cotton that there is a — — — Yankee 
artillery officer here, and tell him to come get 
him." That was preciselywhat I had been ex- 
pecting. I drew my heavy revolver, silently 
cocked it, then threw the door wide open and 
instantly covered the typical Southern planter 
and his yellow son, and said : " Come in here, 
you damned villains, or I will kill both of you." 
They sullenly re-entered the house, and sat on 
two chairs in a corner for the remainder of the 
night, while I sat by the fire. The night was 
long. Conversation lagged. I thought morn- 
ing would never come. When it did come my 
host and his yellow son and I took a walk be- 
fore breakfast. They preceded me down the 
railroad track for two miles. There I bade 
them farewell and walked briskly to the next 
station, where I found a detachment of an 
Illinois regiment, which was commanded by a 
young sergeant, who gave me a welcome and a 
breakfast. I have told this incident simply 
to illustrate the feeling of the small and igno- 
rant Southern planters, — men who owned a few 
slaves, and who knew that they would be ruined 
by the suppression of the slaveholders' rebel- 
lion. 



244 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE. 

Arrived at Nashville I was ordered to report 
to the chief of artillery of the Army of the 
Cumberland, at Eastport, Mississippi. I went 
to Paduka, Kentucky, and took steamer up the 
Tennessee River. This boat was loaded with 
provisions and soldiers returning from furlough. 
Going up the Tennessee River in a steamboat 
was not as monotonous then as it is now. 
Guerrillas and bushwhackers lurked in the 
forests which bordered the river. The pilot- 
houses of all boats which plied the river were 
protected with heavy boiler-plate iron to keep 
out Confederate rifle-balls. Southern sympa- 
thizers amused themselves, and served their 
cause, by endeavoring to kill the pilots of the 
steamboats, so as to wreck them. Daily we 
saw many men, clad in homespun, skulking in 
the forest. They dodged from tree to tree. 
They lay behind stumps and logs. They knew 
the forest trails. They could not be captured. 
Puffs of powder smoke would shoot forth from 
behind trees or out of dense thickets, and fre- 
quently the balls would enter the pilot-house 
through unprotected windows in front. The 
pilots did not wince. They said that they re- 
ceived large pay, and that part of their duty 
was to serve as targets for skulking sharp- 



IN THE SOUTHWEST. 245 

shooters. When unwary soldiers exposed them- 
selves, they were promptly fired at, and occa- 
sionally shot. Then their comrades would rush 
on deck and fire scores of shots at the place 
where the bushwhacker was last seen. Present- 
ly there would be a puff of smoke from another 
point. Then all the soldiers would shoot at 
that point. Daily soldiers were killed and 
wounded on the steamer. I do not believe 
that a single bushwhacker was shot, and thou- 
sands of balls were shot at them. The farther 
south we went, the more numerous were the 
lurking sharp-shooters. 

I found the Army of the Cumberland at 
Eastport, and reported for duty. I was amazed 
to learn that my battery, H of the Fourth 
Artillery, had been sent East, to Camp Barry, 
at Washington, a month before I left Elmira! 
While I was talking to the chief of artillery, 
General Thomas entered the tent, and smiled 
kindly at my rage. He ordered transportation 
to be furnished to me from Eastport to Wash- 
ington, and that I be ordered there at once. 

I had travelled on an order from Elmira, 
New York, by car, by steamer, on horseback, 
and on foot, for thousands of miles, through 
many States, searching for a battery of artillery 



246 RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE. 

which was all the while at Washington, and 
whose commander daily expected me to appear. 
I never heard of the War Department officials 
being mistaken as to the location of any other 
command during the entire war. 

I returned to Washington, and there saw the 
great army of volunteers melt away. The men 
with whom I had served had gone to work in 
the fields, in the shops, in mills, and in factories. 
I had no interest in the regular army, no de- 
sire to continue to loaf around barracks, and to 
drill foreign-born soldiers. So I resigned my 
commission and went home. 



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